The horrific story of the latest adventure conducted by the religion of peace in Bombay riveted the public’s attention to such an extent that one of the most egregious violations of political freedom in a Western democracy has, at least on this side of the Atlantic, gone almost without comment. I mean the sudden arrest in London last week of of Damian Green, a conservative MP and Shadow Minister for Immigration, who was seized by anti-terrorist personnel from the Metropolitan police, held for questioning for 9 hours, and whose private papers and computer files in his home and office in the House of Commons were confiscated. The Honorable Member’s offense? Embarrassing Gordon Brown’s government. How did he do this? By revealing in debate on the floor of the House of Commons and in various lapses, failures, and dirty-little-secrets about the government’s immigration policy, e.g.,
* the fact that the home secretary knew that the Security Industry Authority had granted licences to 5,000 illegal workers, but decided not to publicise it.
* the fact that an illegal immigrant had been employed as a cleaner in the House of Commons.
* A whips’ list of potential Labour rebels in the vote on plans to increase the pre-charge terror detention limit to 42 days.
In other words, Mr. Green was doing exactly what a member of the Opposition should do: shedding light on the government’s failures in order to make it more accountable to the public.
The ever percipient Janet Daley, writing in the London Telegraph, got it exactly right: Mr. Green’s arrest, and the government’s subsequent denial of knowledge of or responsibility for the actions of the police, represents a “grotesque breach of political freedom and constitutional principle.”
Anyone who thinks that this incident is being somehow blown out of proportion by opposition politicians and an excitable media had better think again. A senior opposition spokesman has been arrested and detained, had his personal possessions and confidential correspondence examined, and his family home occupied, without being suspected of any criminal offence.
The object of the exercise seems to have been intimidation and the flaunting of power. Short of an outright, totalitarian suspension of democracy, this is about as serious as it gets. Freedom is under threat in ways that we would not have thought conceivable a generation ago. The threat seems to be coming in various forms from a government desperate to save its own credibility and to be so convinced of its moral righteousness that it can justify the most blatant abuses of what we had taken to be the fundamental principles of a free society.
Britain is the cradle of modern democracy and political liberty. As Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, put it “This is something you might expect from a tin-pot dictatorship, not in a modern democracy.”
Mr. Green’s arrest, and the violation of his private papers and computer files, is only one ominous sign that those ancient birth rights are under siege. Another is the British government’s blundering into the the economic crisis by nationalizing banks. Ms. Daley is spot on about the implications of this as well:
Infuriated by the banks’ unwillingness to lend money readily (even though it was lending money too readily that got them into so much trouble in the first place), the Government threatens to take them over. It uses the language of moral outrage to justify the threat of nationalisation: the banks are behaving “selfishly” and “irresponsibly” by refusing to offer easier credit (even though it was also “selfish” and irresponsible” of them to offer credit that was too easy).
Such a nationalisation of the banking system would constitute nothing less than the true Marxist dream of “seizing the commanding heights of the economy”. And since financial services are now Britain’s most important industry, taking over the banks could be understood as achieving the chief communist goal of taking “ownership of the means of production”.
But no one is going to put it quite like that. The language of all this is terribly important. The modern parties of the Left make use of the most attractive words, such as “fair” and “progressive” in which to package their attacks on personal freedom and private responsibility.
I am glad that Ms. Daley mentioned the flagrant abuse of language that accompanies these outrages. The collusion of totalitarianism and such abuse was something that George Orwell understood and publicized to arresting effect in 1984. At bottom, it flows from the effort to bend reality to suit utopian fantasies. Stage one is an unwillingness to call things by their real names: euphemism in the service of ideology. Jacqui Smith, the British Home Secretary, claims to have known nothing about the arrest of Mr. Green by an agency under her authority. But then Ms Smith is also the Minister who declared a couple of years ago after another bombing carried out by members of the religion of peace that such homicidal outrages should not described as “Islamic terrorism” but rather “anti-Islamic activity.”
And what about Stage Two? Read Orwell. Haven’t we been here before?
[UPDATE: Lest you think this is a Tory or a “conservative” issue, take a look at Henry Porter’s robust condemnation of the arrest in The Guardian.]
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