Skip Nav | Home | Mobile | Editorial Guidelines | Mission Statement | About Us | Contact | Help | Security | Support Us

World

MPs fiddle while parliamentary democracy burns

Henry | 15.02.2009 11:43 | Analysis | Repression | Social Struggles | South Coast | World


At the very least, you might expect Labour MPs to pay attention while they strip this country of its freedoms. But apparently we have gone beyond that stage. Of the eight or nine Labour members on the select committee discussing the Coroners and Justice Bill, three were using the opportunity to go through their correspondence.



The air was heavy with obscure points, but the room was comfortable and the light good, allowing Alun Michael, Russell Brown and Brian Iddon to put in an hour or two on the piles of letters and documents in front of them.

Only when the matter of secret inquests was raised and Conservative MP Henry Bellingham observed by way of a prologue that an issue of freedom was at stake did Michael and Brown look up. Bellingham said he had spent time out of parliament between the 1997 and 2001 elections and that he was shocked when he returned to see what Labour was doing to constitutional rights and civil liberties.

"The government," he said quite mildly, considering the circumstances, "is trampling on the rights of the individual and has turned this into a less free country."

Cue Michael and Brown with a noise first heard in the rock shelters of the Upper Paleolithic. It is the jeer of the strong for the weak. But Bellingham is not weak and he went on to say that the proposed secret inquests would certainly be subject to the legislative creep that had seen terror laws used to freeze the assets of stricken Icelandic banks.

The very idea of secret inquests caused widespread dismay, he said. It was a fundamental attack on transparency; secrecy would be used to protect the state from embarrassment and blame in cases where members of the armed service had been killed or people had died in custody.

Another muted jeer followed. I was reminded of Derek Hatton's Trotskyist takeover of Liverpool City Council in the Eighties and of Squealer and his underling pigs in Orwell's Animal Farm. The government has become so used to its power that Labour MPs do not even acknowledge the issues of transparency and rights.

They sit back and mock these appeals from our history, from the oldest parliamentary democracy in the world that happens just now to find itself at a low ebb, while the civil servants, in this case from Jack Straw's Justice Department, look on with smugness as each clause in this appalling bill is discussed and slips through more or less unscathed.

And where were the media in this era of 24-hour news coverage? Well, it was just me and Simon Carr from the Independent on the press benches - a fleeting visit like the one we made three years ago to the committee stage of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which, if it had not been dropped, would have allowed ministers to make laws without even consulting parliament.

This bill is a shocker. Do not be deceived by Jack's title. It is a supermarket trolley full of bits of legislation that the government and the civil service want passed. As well as introducing the opportunity for a minister to decree that an inquest should be held in secret to protect the state, or its relations with foreign powers, it removes exemption for "discussion or criticism" in the new offence of inciting hatred on grounds of sexual orientation; it makes changes to legal aid; reforms bail in murder cases; extends the law of child pornography to include non-photographic images; and facilitates the sharing of personal data by all government departments.

The strategy is clear. Secret inquests will draw the fire on the bill and then - conveniently - there will be no time to debate the huge issue of uncontrolled sharing of personal information between government departments and agencies. As the Lords report on surveillance society stated two weeks ago: "The huge rise in surveillance and data collection by the state risks undermining the long-standing traditions of privacy and individual freedom which are vital for democracy."

That sentence might suggest that we are in something of crisis, yet parliament has reacted by taking another holiday - a 10-day break to celebrate St Valentine's Day perhaps, or Our Lady of Lourdes, or for Michael, Brown and Iddon to catch up on their correspondence. Nobody will be surprised when it is announced that there isn't enough time to debate properly the data sharing measures because Harriet Harman has also scheduled 17 days for the Easter recess and 10 days for Whitsun.

This compulsive holidaying must seem extraordinary to a worried public and it underlines two things. First, that government regards parliament as less and less essential to running the country and the business of chivvying the public and filling our lives with petty new laws. Second, that MPs have become more remote from the public.

That no prosecutions are going to follow the revelations that Labour members of the House of Lords were prepared to make amendments to laws for cash, that the Home Secretary can get away with fiddling her expenses on her second home frankly bewilders people who live in the normal world of punishment and accountability.

A member of the public suspected of such behaviour would have been arrested, photographed, fingerprinted and had their DNA taken, then almost certainly charged with fraud. But the Home Secretary is allowed to make a weasel-worded statement about not breaking the rules and return to the dismantling of our free society.

As well as failing to see their own flaws, politicians are remarkably keen to criticise outside institutions and society. The current rhetorical conceit of the Tories says that Britain is a "broken society". There are many things wrong with our society, but it is not broken. And Labour's contempt for the public seems to be even sharper; you have only to spend time with a Labour MP before they begin to muse on the reform of the House of Lords. It rarely seems to occur to both parties that the one institution that is really ripe for radical reform is the Commons. Never have I felt this more acutely than watching the Coroners and Justice Bill in committee and Alun Michael glance from his papers to smirk at the word "transparency" uttered by Henry Bellingham.

Henry

Comments

Display the following comment

  1. Corrupt and Dishonorable Parliament — Ahmed Balogun

Publish

Publish your news

Do you need help with publishing?

/regional publish include --> /regional search include -->

World Topics

Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista

Kollektives

Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World

Other UK IMCs
Bristol/South West
London
Northern Indymedia
Scotland

Server Appeal Radio Page Video Page Indymedia Cinema Offline Newsheet

secure Encrypted Page

You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.

If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

IMCs


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech