Brontides

The coalition government is making many of the right noises when it comes to civil liberties in the UK. Unpicking the authoritarian streak that Labour exhibited during its years in power is a worthwhile task that shouldn’t be trivialised, but the debate surrounding civil liberties is still defined by the rigid limits set out by those who enjoy many of the greatest privileges.

The list of areas to be targeted describes a largely positive direction of travel. ID cards and biometric passports are to be scrapped; the fingerprinting of children at schools is to be curtailed. Government databases are to be pruned back. FOI is to be extended; libel laws will be reviewed to protect freedom of speech; CCTV is to be regulated. A “Great Repeal Bill” promises to cut through swathes of redundant and obstructive legislation; in an email to his supporters, Nick Clegg suggested that the bill would

…roll back Labour’s surveillance state, scrapping ID cards, the children’s database and restoring civil liberties.

In areas like education, health and policing people are going to get much greater powers over the services in their area. And we are going to hand more powers to communities and councils.

All very fine and worthy. But the proposals are geared overwhelmingly towards a single section of society as beneficiaries. ID cards and CCTV are middle-class concerns. Freedoms of information and speech can be seen as a stimulus package for Britain’s already over-eager newspaper industries and will result in ever-more salacious stories for their largely middle-class audiences. The power to modify the services offered by schools, hospitals and local police forces are dogwhistle sops to Middle Britain. And while the exact form of the Great Repeal Bill is yet to be revealed, it seems unlikely to tackle such personal infringements as stop-and-search, the Dangerous Dogs Act, control orders, or ASBOs, which tend to target the poorer sections of society disproportionately.

But even the wild class disparity in the conversation is mild compared to the glaring hole that exists when talking about the most disadvantaged groups of all: political and economic migrants, and asylum seekers (the treatment of whom can be particularly inhumane). While the government’s commitment to reversing extended detention without trial is a big, and welcome, improvement, ASBOs in particular continue to be used as a method of suppressing dissent, as in this account from 2006:

Recently, at a demonstration outside Harmondsworth detention centre in solidarity with asylum seekers, I was hemmed in with 50 other protestors when the police used powers under section 14 of the Public Order Act 1986 to impose a blanket Asbo on anyone who tried to get near the buildings.

They then used powers under section 50 of the Police Reform Act 2002, which makes it an offence to refuse to give your name and address to a police officer who “reasonably suspects” that you have engaged in “anti-social behaviour”. A few people who refused were arrested.

This was no violent protest, and there was no threat to public order or anyone’s personal safety. But the demonstration gave the police an opportunity to use the laws to collect intelligence on “troublemakers”, without having to show that they had actually made any trouble.

This is particularly germane on the day in which the Parliament Square protestors lost their legal right to express their views – thanks to a decidedly illiberal misuse of existing powers.

The discussion on civil liberties in the UK remains too enmired in privilege. Part of this is because libertarians strongly tend to be middle class, white and male; their political preferences tend to reflect their (often unchallenged) social biases and privileges. Part of it, too, is because Labour have consistently chosen not to make social freedom a cause that they would fight for on behalf of the working classes, leaving it as a policy ground for the Lib Dems and the Tories – parties with their roots firmly in the middle classes – to scoop up.

But whatever the reason for the disparity, there is an opportunity now for the civil rights of all sections of society to be strengthened and extended. It requires that we not allow the discussion to be limited to those rights enjoyed by those who already enjoy entrenched rights and securities, whose political access is already entrenched. The work of organisations like Liberty needs greater support and needs to be extended to ensure that human dignity is respected at all levels of society. The rights enjoyed by well-off British citizens, while by no means complete, are some of the most extensive in the history of the world. It behoves us to extend those rights as far through our culture as is conceivably possible.