24 Jan 2014 | News and features, Politics and Society, United Kingdom
If you want to know what a party stands for, watch its leader’s speeches. But if you want to know what they’re going to do, read their proposed legislation.
It’s in the details that you learn what a party is all about. Ed Miliband has made several set-piece speeches promising a Labour commitment to civil liberties. But dig into the legislation they support and you find the same old attitudes, making the same old mistakes.
Backbench Labour MP Thomas Docherty has a private members bill going through the Commons today called the Armed Forces (Prevention Of Discrimination) Bill. It’s a shoddy piece of work. He wants assaults – verbal or physical – against members of the armed forces or their families to be treated as aggravated. And he wants them to be included in equality legislation prohibiting discrimination.
None of this should be worth mentioning. Backbench MPs have all sorts of embarrassing and reprehensible ideas, the majority of which never see the light of day. But this time Labour swung its weight behind the private members bill. Shadow defence secretary Vernon Coaker said the party would back Docherty’s efforts and demanded the government do the same.
Coaker was playing a game of chicken with the Ministry of Defence. It would win him a good write-up in the red-tops, a part of the press Labour is struggling to get any traction with. And he guessed that the fear of looking insufficiently supportive of ‘our boys’ would force defence secretary Phillip Hammond’s hand.
Had he considered what the proposals might actually entail for freedom of speech, Coaker might have thought again. But consideration and populism do not make good bedfellows.
The bill would blur the boundaries of discrimination, so that it no longer refers only to who you are, but what you do. This would be a massive legal change. No longer would discrimination law only apply to fundamental human qualities like sexuality or race, it would now be expanded to include commentary on what someone does in their working life.
It would do this in two ways. Firstly, it would expand the common use of aggravated assault from race and religion to membership of the armed forces. Secondly it would include membership of the armed forces under the Equality Act’s protections against discrimination in the provision of goods and services.
The ways in which this type of lazy lawmaking can be abused are not difficult to imagine.
Imagine the squaddies who enter a pub, loud, drunk and aggressive. Unfortunately, this is not rare. Recent Lancet research showed a strong correlation between aggressive behaviour in Britain and psychological trauma experienced in overseas theatres like Afghanistan and Iraq. This puts the barman in an unenviable position. If he allows them in, he risks violence. If he bars them, he is subject to prosecution under equality legislation.
Imagine the anti-war campaigner arguing with the squaddie about whichever conflict Britain is involved in at the time. How strenuous do his arguments have to be before we decide they constitute ‘verbal assault’? If he tells the squaddie that he spilled blood for oil? Or that soldiers are baby killers? The law threatens to criminalise anything but the most tepid and restrained anti-war argument.
Most importantly of all, what precedent does it set? How long will it be before other professions are entitled to protection under equality law? The police would follow the armed forces soon enough. And after them would come the MPs. It is not hard to imagine a situation in which a banker is attacked by a mob and politicians then include them in the blanket of extra legal rights.
Before we know it whole professions would enjoy much stronger legal protections than the rest of the population. The bill is a threat against the principle that all British subjects have equal rights and freedoms.
Mercifully, the government has not taken the bait. An MoD spokesperson told me they didn’t believe legislation was necessary, but that they were instead pursuing their voluntary ‘corporate covenant’ with the armed forces.
But Labour’s decision to swing its weight behind this dangerous bit of populism speaks volumes about the party’s approach to these issues. Despite Miliband’s high talk about civil liberties when he took the leadership of the party, it still appears to have the same crude, dismissive view of freedom of speech as it did under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
It’s the same old deal. They are willing to trade away British legal standards in exchange for a good write-up in the Sun.
This article was posted on 24 January 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
23 Jan 2014 | News and features, Politics and Society, United Kingdom
(Photo illustration: Shutterstock)
The parliamentary struggle over the UK government’s gagging bill, which has overshadowed Westminster in recent months, is all but over. And the end result is bad news for British democracy.
Yesterday ministers secured their final victories against freedom of speech campaigners. Their plans to make it much harder for charities to get their voices heard during election periods – exactly when their contribution is needed most – are about to become law as a result.
The transparency of lobbying, non-party campaigning and trade union administration bill, to give it its full title, has troubled civil liberties activists from start to finish.
Its attempted clampdown on the public affairs industry by forcing third-party lobbyists on to a statutory register, has been roundly dismissed because in-house lobbyists – the vast majority – are simply not included.
This flawed solution to the bill’s main target has been accompanied by a brutal attack on the voluntary sector. The government’s aim was to force small-scale charities, community groups and the like on to a complicated regulatory regime.
Such would have been the chilling effect of this law that most local-issue campaigning during elections would have been stifled when it came to election time. No surprise the legislation was dubbed the ‘gagging bill’.
As it was, bitter opposition to the proposals finally forced ministers to the negotiating table. Instead of lowering the threshold at which charities must begin reporting their activities to the Electoral Commission watchdog, it was increased to £20,000.
This was a major concession. There were other, smaller retreats too, on how long ‘election time’ actually means — it was reduced from one year to 7.5 months — and by excluding some costs like spending on translation into Welsh, or security, from controlled expenditure.
Ultimately, though, these alterations failed to change the bill’s big impact: that important voices encouraging politicians to make promises, and then holding them to their word, are to be stifled.
The Lords did its best to limit the damage. It inflicted embarrassing defeats on the government, which meant when the bill returned to the Commons yesterday MPs had to vote on whether or not to overturn the changes.
As the bill was being debated in the Commons chamber the atmosphere was one of resentment and frustration from the opposition benches — and a smug superiority from ministers. They knew they had already won the war. Now they were about to win the last of its battles, too.
A critical division came over staffing costs. For the bigger household names, like Countryside Alliance or Oxfam, this really matters.
The gagging bill is reducing the total amount a campaigning group can spend in a general election period from £988,000 to £390,000. Say it employs ten staff on a £20,000 salary — by including the staffing costs, the amount actually available to spend on leaflets and demonstrations and advertising is slashed still further.
Yesterday the government whipped its MPs against the Lords amendments. Groups like 38 Degrees had been mobilising their members to urge wavering MPs to rebel. In their offices earlier this week, staff expressed delight as the number of emails sent to backbenchers who’d previously expressed disquiet shot upwards.
Back in parliament, the mood at this campaigning onslaught was grim. One MP I spoke to was so worked up he got his staff to forward me the emails as they came in, to demonstrate just how disruptive they were. The flood which followed was, indeed, deeply irritating – about 50 poured in over the course of just a couple of hours.
Elsewhere, a Tory veteran even phoned up the police to complain about a group of activists wanting to petition him at his home. The bitter irony of this didn’t pass unnoticed.
Ultimately, all the efforts to sway the Commons didn’t make much of a difference. When it came to a vote the coalition’s majority was reduced to 32. But it still won, and the Lords’ improvements were consigned to history.
What caused this diminishing of our democracy? It’s mostly the result of those in power simply not caring much for the views of others. The latest reports from Downing Street indicate that senior No 10 strategists are desperate to find ways of reducing the pledges which candidates make during general elections. It’s much easier to avoid breaking promises, after all, if you haven’t made them in the first place.
And yet that is exactly what democracy, and free speech in Britain, are about: the ability to highlight when politicians are not sticking to their commitments, and the opportunity to encourage them to stick by a cause. Charities are a vital part of this, but the gagging bill is undermining their ability to make the case.
The result is not so much a law which makes it almost impossible for small-scale charities and voluntary groups to campaign during general elections, but one which merely makes the lives of their employees more difficult and awkward.
At the end of it all, democracy in Britain has got just a little bit worse. Our future elections will be slightly poorer affairs than before. The country we were in 2013 is not the country we shall be when, in a short while, the Queen finally hands royal approval to her government’s gagging bill.
This article was published on 23 January 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
16 Jan 2014 | News and features, Politics and Society, United Kingdom
Derek Clark MEP (Image: Euro Realist Newsletter/Wikimedia Commons)
The UK Independence Party has promised it will ban the teaching of climate change in schools, if elected in May next year.
The party’s 2010 manifesto included a pledge to ban Al Gore’s Oscar-winning global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth from schools.
But this week UKIP Education spokesman MEP Derek Clark has said the party will go even further. Clark told Index on Censorship:
We will still ban Al Gore’s video for use in schools if I’ve got anything to do with it. I will not have much opposition within the party. It is, of course, not just this video which needs banning; all teaching of global warming being caused in any way by carbon dioxide emissions must also be banned. It just is not happening.”
Dr Nick Eyre, Jackson Senior Research Fellow in Energy at the ECI and Oriel College Oxford and Co-Director of the UK Energy Research Centre, said of the proposal: “It is anti-scientific nonsense – as well as a worryingly repressive approach to education. The very strong link between climate change and anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is overwhelmingly accepted by the global scientific community, and has been for at least 25 years.”
A recent IPCC report shows that scientists believe with 95% certainty that humans are the “dominant cause” of global warming. A 2013 study by UK Energy Research Centre, however, showed that 46% believe that climate change is ‘partly caused by human activity’, 22% believe that climate change is ‘mainly caused by human activity’ and another 6% believe that climate change is ‘entirely caused by human activity’. In total 74% of those surveyed believed that human activity is responsible for climate change.
This article was posted on 15 Jan 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
An earlier version of this article stated: “95% of scientists believe that humans are the ‘dominate cause’ of global warming.” It has been edited to: “scientists’ believe with 95% certainty that humans are the ‘dominate cause’ of global warming.
This article was amended to include the total number of people in the UK Energy Research Centre study who believe that human activity is responsible for climate change.
9 Jan 2014 | News and features, Politics and Society, United Kingdom
(Illustration: Shutterstock)
The British government’s plans to jail people the courts judge to be persistently ‘annoying’ has been defeated in the Lords – but remains a serious threat to freedom of speech in the UK.
Ministers’ baffling proposals would dramatically broaden the scope of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs). They want to replace these with the so-called Injunctions to Prevent Nuisance and Annoyance (IPNAs), which could still become law if ministers hold their guns when the legislation returns to the Commons later this year.
But right now the broad coalition of campaigners who have fought Clause 1 of the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill are celebrating after the Lords last night decisively backed an amendment reversing the change.
The debate revealed just how extraordinarily blasé the government’s attitude to the reforms is. Rapidly lowering the threshold needed for an injunction will, ministers hope, make it harder for groups of miscreant youths to dodge having an ASBO slapped on them. What has left so many people really shocked is their inability to realise doing so would have terrible consequences for free speech.
Instead of only being applicable where a person or group causes or threatens to cause “harassment, alarm or distress”, the new injunction ministers were proposing to introduce was supposed to apply to all behaviour deemed “capable of causing nuisance or annoyance”.
It sounds laughable – and it is. Yesterday’s debate saw peers point out all kinds of behaviour which could be included in this definition, from smoking at a bus stop to handing out flyers to winding up the fan of a struggling football club. Carol-singers, bell-ringers, buskers, canvassers, trick-or-treaters, clay pigeon shooters, nudists: All would be affected because they would all be guilty of behaviour which could “reasonably be expected to cause” annoyance.
Those who repeatedly defy an injunction handed down by the courts, who many believe would have little option but to interpret the law more broadly than the government would like, would end up in jail.
Worst of all for our democracy, political protests would become much more vulnerable to being broken up by police under the changes.
“I suppose there are some in this House who might not have attended a demonstration or march,” Baroness Mallalieu told peers yesterday, “but I would wager they are in a minority.” She was talking about the kind of protest which irritates others because of delayed traffic, or the loud chanting, or the time taken off work. These would obviously fall under the scope of the changes. The baroness was not the only peer to quote Lord Justice Sedley’s ruling in a 1997 high court case, when he declared: “Freedom to only speak inoffensively is not worth having.”
There are further fears about the changes, too. Applications for IPNAs can only be made via agencies of the state, like the police or local authorities or government departments. Some believe vexatious obsessives would bombard them with demands for an injunction until they got their way.
Others think the change would result in people being moved on by police officers before the cases ever got to the courts. Ian Blair, the former Metropolitan police commissioner, recalled being on duty in Soho when a local resident demanded steps be taken against a man leafleting. “My Auntie Mabel is annoying,” Blair remembered his colleague saying, “but I’m not going to arrest her just for it.” His fear is that changing the word would lead to countless examples of police officers taking a different attitude in the future. They would go for the path of least resistance by breaking up all kinds of activity which has nothing to do with harassment and everything to do with freedom of speech. “This,” Blair summed up, “is a piece of absolutely awful legislation”.
The defeat which followed was a big one, by 306 votes to 178. But the government’s hold over the Lords is not that strong and since 2010 there have been over 80 such defeats. Ministers could simply reinsert the clause back into the bill when it returns to the Commons – meaning campaigners may have won this battle, but could still lose the war.
The Home Office’s official line, from crime prevention minister Norman Baker, is: “The bill was never intended to ban noisy children or carol singers and does not do so as currently drafted. I am disappointed the Lords fell for what appear to be scare stories.”
There might just be grounds for optimism, even though the timing is particularly painful. Next month, it becomes possible once again to insult others without the fear of being arrested for doing so under the Public Order Act 1986. That was a similar outrageous infringement of freedom of speech which is now being reversed after MPs defied the government last year.
Will they repeat that courageous stand to protect this most basic of civil liberties when the government’s attempt to outlaw being ‘annoying’ returns to the Commons? Let’s hope so.
This article was published on 9 Jan 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
