15 June 2015 marks 800 years since a rather famous charter was agreed by the unpopular King John at Runnymede, under pressure from a group of rebellious barons who had backed his failed war against the French and now sought to constrain him.
The severely weakened king had no choice but to bear witness to the sealing of what many now perceive as one of the world’s most important documents. It has become iconic, but it has its detractors. It is a favourite pastime of dry historians and politically motivated lawyers to pick the myth apart and express their disdain for the reverence shown to the old document.
It is quite true that we tend now to view it through rose tinted glasses after much historical revisionism and the creation of a national myth around the event.
The details of the actual event and the passage of the charter into law are often oversimplified or caricatured. The date which we will this year mark, and the document we celebrate, is revered in part because of the manner in which it has been used by those with a political agenda.
“For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens ‘as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone'” – David Cameron, 2015
Pick your poison.
What’s worse? A Labour government that ruins the economy and condemns millions of people to lives of hard subsistence, bleating all the while about how fair and progressive they are, or a Conservative government promising semi-competent handling of the economy but itching to trample away our precious few remaining civil liberties now that they are no longer restrained by coalition?
Britain voted for the latter on May 7 this year, and on balance this was probably the right choice in the short term. But with David Cameron back in Downing Street and Theresa May re-confirmed as Home Secretary, anyone remotely concerned about civil liberties and jealous of their existing freedoms will need to organise to stop them being steamrollered in a flurry of quick legislating while this Conservative majority government is still in its honeymoon phase.
The fact that David Cameron could utter such words as the head of government of a western country is absolutely appalling, and only reconfirms everything that this blog and many others have disliked about the current Conservative Party leadership for some time.
Gone is any sense of small-L liberalism, trusting the people to know and do what is best for themselves and their communities. And in its place comes a heavy-handed, hawkish paternalism, made all the more offensive by the patronising tone in which it seeks to assert control over our lawmaking.
It is increasingly fashionable among self-identified progressives and left-wingers, particularly within academic environments, to promote the idea of “safe spaces” – places where the normal right to free speech is heavily curtailed in order to protect designated minorities and victim groups from encountering words and ideas that might cause them mental discomfort.
This blog finds the idea of such “safe spaces” utterly repellent, and a prime symptom of the infantilisation of many students in Britain and America – a generation of cosseted idealists who interpret any political disagreement as a sinister attempt to “invalidate their experiences”, who are unable to tolerate even polite dissent and who are lightning-quick to call for authority figures to come crashing down upon the heads of those who question their “dearly and closely held beliefs”.
But put aside the childishness of the “safe space” and the potentially chilling implication of such policies on the fundamental right to freedom of expression. Put aside the fact that protecting certain ideas from scrutiny, however noble they may be, leads to intellectual atrophy and erodes our democracy in just the same way it undermines the core purpose of a university.
What is really shocking is the double-standard at play. Those designated victim groups and their advocates on the left are free to say and do anything they please, empowered and protected by the perceived righteousness of their cause, while those outside this bien pensant collective have no right to hold their own opinions, let alone to express them or to campaign for them politically.
It is this double-standard which allows a mob of young anti-UKIP protesters to invade a London pub far from the campaign trail where UKIP leader Nigel Farage was quietly enjoying lunch with his family, to harass and intimidate Farage’s family to the extent that his young children fled and were separated from their parents, and to jump on the bonnet of his car as he attempted to drive away – and still come away feeling as though it were they, the mob, who had taken a stand for freedom, tolerance and decency.
Prohibiting extremist preachers from speaking on university campuses will not stop the radicalisation of impressionable young minds – and the ongoing coalition row between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats shows the Tories at their authoritarian worst.
“Should these men be allowed in UK universities?” frets The Times of London, in a report which begins:
Radical and intolerant Islamist leaders preached to crowds of students at almost 200 official events in the past year, according to a study of external speakers at universities including Cambridge, Birmingham and University College London.
Segregated seating for male and female students is understood to have been implemented for at least a quarter of those public meetings held by the Islamic societies at 21 universities.
The issue of university campus extremism has been brought into sharp relief since it emerged that Mohammed Emwazi, or “Jihadi John”, may have been radicalised while studying at Westminster University in London. This revelation has led to renewed scrutiny of various Muslim student organisations, their invited speakers and their practices (such as segregated seating in some instances). And this scrutiny is often welcome.
But the government goes too far when it seeks to make universities responsible for enforcing the censorship of ideas deemed “extremist”, as the BBC reports:
Coming soon to a British town square near you: trigger-happy and power-corrupted police officers, newly armed with water cannon, ready to hose you down with a cooling blast of high powered icy water if the authorities do not approve of the cause or tone of your protest.
The Association of Chief Police Officers, or ACPO, is submitting a request to the Home Secretary, Theresa May, to authorise the use of water cannon in any town or city across England and Wales. They are doing this, they insist, to bolster their ability to control anticipated protests from what they call “ongoing and potential future austerity measures”.
The Association of Chief Police Officers says that the need to control continued protests “from ongoing and potential future austerity measures” justifies the introduction of water cannon across Britain for the first time.
The London mayor, Boris Johnson, has already announced a consultation on the introduction of water cannon on to the streets of London ready for use by this summer.
A new Acpo/College of Policing briefing paper makes clear that chief constables across England and Wales have also been asked to discuss water cannon with their police and crime commissioners and “it is anticipated that the home secretary will be approached in early 2014 in respect of water cannon authorisation”.
This attempt by ACPO to raise the spectre of an implausible large-scale breakdown in public order is complete and utter nonsense, a risible and transparent excuse to bring draconian tools of crowd control to the streets of a generally calm and peaceful liberal democracy.
This is not Ukraine or Greece. And even if we were, like Ukraine, in the grip of large-scale civil disturbances, there is every chance that the fault would rest primarily with the fictitious government and not the fictitious protesters; so why further tilt the odds even further in favour of government power to suppress dissent by arming the police with water cannon?
But the really chilling disclosure comes next:
The police envisage using their water cannon to “exert control from a distance and critically to provide a graduated and flexible application of force ranging from spray to forceful water jets. The mere presence of water cannon can have a deterrent effect and experience from Northern Ireland demonstrates that water cannon are often deployed without being employed.”
Behold the power of the deterrent effect on freedom of speech and assembly. The ACPO will make it widely known that they are purchasing some new, state-of-the-art water cannon, weapons capable of blasting 9000 litres of water into a crowd in just five minutes at potentially deadly force, and sit back and watch the anticipated protests about this or that suddenly fail to materialise – or so the theory goes. But here the enemies of civil liberties may have underestimated the level of public opposition to their scheme.
We may rarely give a second thought to the scenes of plucky, unfortunate foreign demonstrators being blasted off their feet by high power jets of water often shown in television news reports from overseas, but if such a thing were to begin happening in Trafalgar Square or in the shadow of Parliament it would be another matter entirely. The British people will not abide a bully.
Scraping the barrel for recent examples of civil disorder to justify their unprecedented request, the chief police constables produced three very weak cases:
[David Shaw, West Mercia Chief Constable] cites three occasions in the past 10 years when police commanders would have considered using water cannon on the streets of London had they been available.
He names them as the Countryside Alliance demonstration in Parliament Square in 2010, the Gaza demonstrations against the Israeli embassy in 2008-09 and “potentially” the student protests of 2010, when specific locations were targeted.
They would also have been considered during the August riots of 2011 but he concedes they would have had only limited impact on the “fast, agile disorder” seen then.
So apparently farmers and bolshy students number among the most grave threats to law and order currently on the radar of the British police. How heartening it is to know that police chiefs up and down the country are so in tune with the fears and concerns of the communities that they purportedly serve.
More ridiculous still, ACPO themselves admit that water cannon would have been entirely useless in confronting the most recent case of serious civil disturbance in Britain, the August 2011 riots, because the looting and damaging was too fleet-footed and agile. It turns out that people intent on smashing and grabbing merchandise from the windows of electronic goods stores tend not to stand still at the scene of their crime, link arms and form orderly ranks so as to be efficiently mowed down by a hastily-scrambled water cannon.
So what is this really all about? One explanation could be that ACPO are politically agitating, and trying to send a message of their disapproval of coalition austerity policies to the public and their elected representatives, essentially saying “we told you that cutting government spending would lead to chaos and disorder and we were right; now we have to take the draconian step of procuring water cannon to prevent the country from sliding into anarchy”.
This is one plausible possibility – as we have seen only too recently with the Andrew Mitchell “plebgate”scandal, there are those in the police force with very hardened agendas who would stop at nothing to discredit or cast doubt on the performance of Conservative ministers.
But in truth, a more convincing explanation is that the police just really fancy having these new toys to scare and intimidate people, that they have decided that building good community relations with the public and doing the hard work of policing large scale events just isn’t worth the effort when they can just bully the public into cowed obedience much more easily.
They likely pursued this strategy in the belief that vague and nebulous references to potential future instances of moderate civil disorder would be sufficient prompting for Theresa May to roll over and grant their wish in her desire to appear tough on the issue of law and order. The British public can only hope that she has the political courage and commitment to civil liberties to tell ACPO to back off – but based on her record, the signs are not encouraging.
Unwarranted plans to bully and intimidate by the ACPO.
The saving grace of this worrying affair will be the newly-created police and crime commissioners, now in place throughout many parts of the country – officials whose primary job it is to advocate for the local population, highlight their concerns and see them addressed by the police forces.
This brazen move by ACPO will be a good early test of the new commissioners. Do they have real teeth, and the strength to dig in their heels and make the police chiefs focus on local priorities rather than their own private Orwellian ambitions, or will they merely act as a fawning rubber stamp to power?
Semi-Partisan Politics 