Criminal Justice and Civil Liberties

As Britain’s political elite wait for this Parliament to begin its most significant work – starting with tomorrow’s budget – one of the issues that has been highest on the agenda is the Coalition Agreement to introduce anonymity for defendants in rape cases.. Much to the frustration of the Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke – this is originally a Lib Dem policy – a predominantly female group of Labour MPs have been regularly ambushing the government at business questions, PMQs and Justice Questions.

There are several reasons for the notoriety this question has raised. On the one hand, it is a useful tool for Labour to beat the government with in its honeymoon period, when few proposals with clear consequences have been announced. The other factor is that the great strides Labour has made in the representation of women in the House of Commons. It is now fair to say that if there is not exactly a female lobby, it is no longer necessary for ambitious women to play up to the party leadership to be a success.

Should anyone accuse me of sexism, the gender card has already been played by Maria Eagles, who accused the government of failing to involve women in its discussions. Caroline Flint is leading the charge and has given an interview to Today in Parliament, as well as intervening in debates on the subject. Her argument is somewhat contrary – the fact that other crimes have a stigma attached is a good argument for extending anonymity, and the supposed signal being sent out about the trustworthiness of victims is worth considering, but doesn’t challenge the point in question head on. Flint is also flimsy on whether there is a great deal of evidence, and whether it is important.

All of this raises some legal questions that are finely balanced, and they are given urgency by a growing culture of victim’s rights. The law on the admission of previous convictions as part of a trial is quite complicated, being subject to a number of tests in the interest of justice. The Scottish Law Commission, which is currently looking at the admission of previous convictions (currently relevant only in sentencing). The recent recurrence of the case of Jon Venables, killer of Jamie Bulger, briefly ignited a debate about whether a case should be tried purely on its merits, or whether it should take in a wider body of evidence.

Liberty made the point in their submission to the last committee to consider the question (and bear in mind that anonymity – meaning a ban on the press coverage of a defendant’s identity – was introduced between 1976 and 1984) that there is a public and a narrow interest in press scrutiny as one of the guarantees of a fair crime. But the interests of the defendant should not be trampled, even if false accusations prove to be a small percentage of the total.

The worst thing that could happen would be for this debate to turn into one about increasing the admittedly woeful rate of prosecution in rape cases, and for the ‘public stocks’ option to be the only one on the table. We are cosy about which of our civil liberties we really believe in, and which we will readily sacrifice to the public safety test, and this is an opportunity for broader thinking than currently looks likely.

Furthermore, it may prove a misreading of the public mood if Labour were to end up on the wrong side of the civil liberties argument. There is plenty of talent chomping at the bit on the Labour benches, and with a re-imagining of British spending commitments and education policy brewing, there are many areas to make a mark on. As they say, however, only fools rush in.

Jo Grimond: Centrist Radical

Jo Grimond: Towards the Sound of Gunfire by Michael McManus

Jo Grimond was a vocal leader of the Liberal Party between 1956 and 1967, a period when it looked as though the vehicle of Gladstone, Asquith and Lloyd George might slip between the cracks of a period of Labour and Conservative dominance. It was testament to his intellectual honesty and sympathetic personality that the Liberals instead grew their share of the House of Commons and the vote.

Grimond took on his party’s inefficient structure in a way reminiscent of recent Labour leaders, establishing solid campaigning machinery. He was also one of the stars of early political television – perhaps the first man to really master it – without ever coming close to a position of influence. It was under the leadership of David Steel from 1974 onwards that the Liberals came closest to power, rejecting Edward Heath’s overtures to support Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, from which position they were largely outmanoeuvred.

The chief legacy of Grimond’s leadership was his proposition of a ‘realignment of the left,’ effectively a call for the Liberals to replace Labour as a counterpoint for Tory reaction. As it happens, his alternate call for the Liberals to occupy the radical centre frequently led to the charge that he would inevitably prop up Labour in office wherever possible, but Grimond was by no means uncritical of the Labour brand of socialism. Indeed, his later ideas are given the flavour of a kind of early Thatcherite conversion by McManus, who was last heard of seeking nomination as a Conservative PPC.

This is, nonetheless, an excellently written biography – sympathetic but not apologetic, informative and schematic, but raising as many questions as it gives answers. Whether Grimond would have made a good minister, let alone Prime Minister, is therefore very much an academic question, but his influence extends to the modern day in various guises.

Though McManus sensibly doesn’t seek to address the level of that influence head on, it is clear that many of Grimond’s tenets have indirectly become part of today’s political settlement, either as policies of Labour or the Conservative Parties (witness; control of inflation, pro-European integration and the enhancement of educational opportunity), or as more recent developments (Cameron’s communitarianism and the cutting of bureaucracy), and if not, as legacies kept alive by today’s Liberal Democrats.

Grimond often talked of the opportunity for people to use their vote to influence affairs in a liberal (and Liberal) direction. He accepted the Alliance and subsequent merger as inevitable and was lauded by Paddy Ashdown as a ‘lion of the liberal cause.’ It seems unlikely that had circumstances been different during his lifetime, Grimond would have taken his party into coalition with the Conservatives. He was of the school of Liberals who sought to ride a crest of Lib-Labbery at the turn of the twentieth century, and might well have sceptically welcomed Tony Blair’s talk of a ‘progressive century.’

The split of Liberal issues across the political spectrum, however, and the mild ascendancy of the Conservatives makes the Coalition that the current leadership has accepted sensible. Grimond would have been pleased with many of the measures suggested, but his legacy was the battle for the independence of liberalism and it would be a pity if in perhaps ten years time his mantle was not adequately filled or the Liberals were again reduced to six seats. Happily, rumours of liberalism’s demise appear to be exaggerated.

Michael Foot

It is true, or true enough, that all political lives end in failure. Michael Foot was no exception – indeed, like Enoch Powell, who enunciated that terribly appropriate phrase, Foot was dragged below the waves after failing to notice the famous ‘sea change’ in public opinion.

Foot was a poor politician, if truth be told. He realised all too late that he had given too many wage increases to the Unions without returns, though the minimum wage was a commitment he handed down. His disarmament campaign was never as sound as it was passionate and he never put in the effort required to keep the Gang of Four in the Labour Party.

Indeed, Roy Hattersley remembers him obsessing more over criticism of a friend’s literary endeavour at the time. Harold Wilson told Roy Jenkins that he could be a semi-detached member of the government. In the increasingly radical Labour Party in Opposition, Foot had no such choice, something suggested in his rueful quotation of Hamlet when asked about his leadership of so difficult a political movement;

“Cursed spite that ever I was asked to put it right.”

Loyalty was central to Foot’s outlook, but he otherwise stood an inscrutable gap between love of and obsession with politics. He devoted his life to it but there were always higher values than electoral popularity.

Foot, born in 1913, came from an age and a party that was a campaigning movement, an insurgency rather than a natural government. Typically, the 1983 manifesto, for which Foot was both famed and blamed, contained all of the resolutions passed by the Labour Conference. As his biographer, Kenneth Morgan has described him;

‘He saw himself in the great line of descent of English radicalism, from the Levellers to the Independent Labour Party. It was a patchy and partisan, but very usable, past.”

He could not, in other words, be more different from New Labour, for which modernisation has come to be dogma, and perpetual government the cause. However, something should be said of the inspiration he provided to a new generation of politicians. Blair et al remained in the Labour Party through the SDP years, and Foot remained grateful, saying;

“No rising hope on the political scene who offered his services to Labour when I happened to be its leader can be dismissed as an opportunist.” (Guardian)

The radicalism of 1983 is greater in hindsight and comparison with Thatcherism. Foot stood for maintenance of the fabled consensus, government by bargaining. Today the government is expected to be all-powerful – a key legacy of Thatcher. Labour’s 1983 manifesto was all about Keynesian stimulation of the economy – less shocking now than three years ago. And the ‘inverterate peacemongerer’ could be more pragmatic than he was given credit for. He praised the good done by the Labour government that was elected in 1997 and wrote that “the West will have to do more than bomb Serbia in order to stop the genocidal activities of its leaders.”

Michael Foot was Labour to his bones, despite a Liberal background. He combined nonconformist passion with revulsion at misfortune, poverty and disadvantage. Politics to him was a pragmatic creed. He was to political theorists what journalists are to political theorists, and his own words speak testament to that;

“We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves.

“That is our only certain good and great purpose on Earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer ‘To hell with them.’ The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do.” (AP)

N.B. These wonderful words were also Foot’s – from his foreword to the 1983 Manifesto. I couldn’t work them in, nor leave them out.

“So let’s put a stop to defeatism, and put a stop too to all those sermons about Victorian values. The labour movement – the Labour Party and the trade unions acting together – came into being, as one of our poets, Idris Davies, said, to end ‘the long Victorian night’. It was a fight to introduce civilised standards into the world of ruthless, devil-take-the-hindmost individualism.

Particularly after our 1945 victory, when Labour had a majority, we set to work creating a real community in which the strong would come to the aid of the weak, in which the profit test would have to make way for the human test.”

Answer Time

The BBC has rolled the dice and played the great gamble.  They didn’t have to invite the BNP onto Question Time, in light of this week’s ruling that in light of the Race Relations Act, the party’s constitution illegally excludes ethnic minorities. And they didn’t have to do so now, of all times, when public trust in politicians is so low.  There is a case – made this morning by Ken Livingstone – that the BBC is morally responsible for any rise in race-related violence that may now occur.

But at some point, the argument would have been null and void.  The BNP has participated in recent elections as an authentic political party.  900,000 people voted for the BNP in June, and they won seats in the European Parliament.  To deny them membership of the political club would set a dangerous precedent and raise awkward questions – who decides?

No longer can senior political figures refuse to address the threat of right-wing extremism, and more to the point, nor will they.  Peter Hain, who argued against showcasing the BNP, made common cause with the hundreds of protestors at White City, but Jack Straw stepped in to ensure a heavyweight political response.  The party is now a mainstream issue.

But did it benefit them?

Well, some of the criticism levelled at Nick Griffin was counter-productive.  The fact that the show revolved so decisively around the BNP to some extent worked in his favour.  Griffin was not challenged on policies, except for those where the BNP has its strongest support, such as immigration. 

Did the rest of the panel look like it took immigration seriously?  Perhaps the Conservative claim to want to cap immigration will pay dividends.  Perhaps not.  Griffin’s talk of ‘indigenous people’ is incoherent, and abhorrent to many, but is emotive and rings true to some.

Griffin may prove to be his worst enemy.  He is a strange, skittish character, who tries hard but can’t be mainstream.  His last appearance on Andrew Marr’s show saw him call for migrants’ boats to be sunk in the middle of the Mediterranean.  Tonight he looked uncomfortable, refused to renounce his Holocaust denial on the basis that he could be extradited to a European country where that is a crime, despite that not being the case.

But he is also shamelessly populist.  Immigration is just one example.  Mr Griffin may claim Winston Churchill as an ideological antecedent, but he refuses to go to war in the Middle East.  In Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps he will chime with public opinion, but his reasons for applying his live and let live philosophy to Iran strikes me as appeasement.  There was even some triangulation – positioning himself between the self-proclaimed mainstream and the really, really nasty right-wing (the violent KKK!), and disapproving equally of Jan Moir’s now infamous Gately-gate article, and homosexuality.

Churchill and I

The amount of time spent discussing Churchill’s place in British history and British present was something of a surprise.  The arguments put forward were patently emotive, and none very satisfactory, largely because they refused to admit the obvious – that cultural standards have changed (dare I say it – I think I do) progressed since Churchill’s day.

To the British Churchill symbolises resistance to encroachments on British sovereignty.  Many on the right today argue that the collaboration he championed after the Second World War is irrelevant to the European Union of today.  For the left to claim Churchill is very difficult.  He was progressive in his Liberal incarnation, and even contributed to the development of the welfare state.  But these facts are not part of the debate.

In many ways, the British reliance on tradition is part of the problem.  I refuse to accept the argument that Labour are responsible for the rise of the BNP by carrying forward privatisation, though there is evidence to suggest that areas where council houses have been sold off are susceptible to the BNP’s message.  There is little fascism in America, after all.

What the debate about the BNP refuses to acknowledge is that mainstream politics cannot succeed without appealing to aspiration.  This year optimism has sunk to new lows, and is not helped by the politics of the depression. 

That said, however, the British are quite capable of rallying around worthy causes, and in today’s Britain, the aspiration of all is the most potent of political weapons.  The elevation of the BNP may prove to be an awakening, but if not, we are sleepwalking into dangerous territory.

 

 

On another note, Andrew Neill’s description of Diane Abbot as a chocolate hobnob (and Michael Portillo as a custard cream) seemed wonderfully appropriate on so many levels.  Anyone else feel the same?