UK Politics

Press Intimidation Must Not Go Unanswered In Britain

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

guardiancomputers

 

There are currently two fronts to the assault on journalism, free speech and a free press in this country. One is the slow chipping away at media autonomy and the ratcheting up of regulation, ostensibly to protect the privacy of the ordinary citizen but really (and quite transparently) all about protecting the interests and the secrets of the wealthy or celebrity elites. The charge on this front is currently led by the likes of Lord Leveson and his report on press regulation.

But the other is much more daring and ambitious. It has nothing to do with tying the press up with legal obstacles to publishing the news, and everything to do with making a very public show of bullying and shaming newspapers who dare to expose illegal or secretive government activity into cowed silence as a warning to others. We now know precisely the extent to which this took place when The Guardian newspaper was forced – in the presence of observers from GCHQ – to destroy the computer equipment in its possession which held the leaked information from the American whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The Guardian reveals:

In two tense meetings last June and July the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, explicitly warned the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, to return the Snowden documents.

Heywood, sent personally by David Cameron, told the editor to stop publishing articles based on leaked material from American’s National Security Agency and GCHQ. At one point Heywood said: “We can do this nicely or we can go to law”. He added: “A lot of people in government think you should be closed down.”

This is the Prime Minister of our country dispatching the top civil servant in the land to personally threaten the editor of a major national newspaper with the forced closure of his publication unless they stop reporting and printing stories and revelations which might be embarrassing to the government.

And intimidation is the only remotely plausible reason for Jeremy Heywood’s visit, because the government was well aware that copies of all the leaked data was held by other news organisations and individuals in other geographic locations, and that destroying only one copy of the files would not prevent the damaging disclosures and news stories:

The government’s response to the leak was initially slow – then increasingly strident. Rusbridger told government officials that destruction of the Snowden files would not stop the flow of intelligence-related stories since the documents existed in several jurisdictions. He explained that Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian US columnist who met Snowden in Hong Kong, had leaked material in Rio de Janeiro. There were further copies in America, he said.

Days later Oliver Robbins, the prime minister’s deputy national security adviser, renewed the threat of legal action. “If you won’t return it [the Snowden material] we will have to talk to ‘other people’ this evening.” Asked if Downing Street really intended to close down the Guardian if it did not comply, Robbins confirmed: “I’m saying this.” He told the deputy editor, Paul Johnson, the government wanted the material in order to conduct “forensics”. This would establish how Snowden had carried out his leak, strengthening the legal case against the Guardian’s source. It would also reveal which reporters had examined which files.

Whether you agree with the actions of Edward Snowden or not, and whether you believe that the British government is justified in allowing the security services to access so much of our personal data at will or that doing so is a gross invasion of privacy and breach of the public trust, I would hope we can all agree that the way in which the Prime Minister’s deputy national security adviser and Cabinet Secretary spoke to a newspaper editor in this country, and the chilling message that they carried, is simply unacceptable in a modern liberal democracy.

In a further brazen move by the government, a hard-to-spot clause in the Deregulation Bill currently before Parliament would allow police to request the seizure and review of journalists’ files and documents in closed, secret court rather than in view of the public (where public disapproval currently stays the hand of any overzealous police chief):

The seizure of journalists’ notebooks, photographs and digital files could be conducted in secret hearings, owing to a little-publicised clause in a government bill aimed at cutting red tape, media organisations have warned.

Requests for notebooks, computer disks, photographs or videos must currently be made in open court and representatives of news groups can be present.

But the clause – in the deregulation bill, which comes before the Commons on Monday – significantly alters the way courts consider so-called “production orders”, stripping out current safeguards.

Although the notebooks and records of journalists can already be seized by police under current law, an application to do so currently has to be made in open court, where the media can be present:

The underlying rules governing whether police can have access to material will remain the same but without media organisations being present it is feared that judges will be more easily persuaded to authorise police seizures of journalistic material. One of the less prominent recommendations of the Leveson inquiry into media standards was that it should be easier for police to obtain journalists’ information. Media organisations already face being charged with contempt of court if they do not comply.

This legislative move proves quite conclusively that the government’s PR / intimidation stunt of forcing The Guardian newspaper to destroy their laptop computers containing files leaked by Edward Snowden was not an isolated incident. Dispatching the Cabinet Secretary to threaten a major news outlet with summary closure unless they comply with government demands may have been the most high profile recent assault on a free press, but the battle is also being waged in more insidious, less headline-grabbing ways. And it must be resisted at all levels.

The government of a free society has no business making it easier for authorities to seize the notes and documents of journalists out of the glare of public scrutiny, just as they should not barge in to a newspaper’s editorial office and issue thinly-veiled ultimatums to comply-or-else.

David Cameron may laugh it off and Oliver Letwin may make some token gestures to soothe the ruffled feathers of those in the journalistic class over the course of the next few days, but this is a deadly serious business. The institutions of democracy, even in an ancient and historical country such as Britain, are ultimately very fragile and liable to being undermined by authoritarians, both well-intentioned and not. And it is deeply concerning when the government can so brazenly and egregiously step over the line delineating protecting the national interest and protecting its own interest, and receive so little censure for doing so.

I hope to see media outlets of all types and political leanings publicly rally to condemn the government and support The Guardian following these latest revelations of state bullying and intimidation. Because there but for the grace of God go us all.

 

Note – Complete footage of Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger’s recent testimony to a Parliamentary committee is here:

 

And footage of the Guardian’s editors destroying their computer equipment under the supervision of GCHQ staff is viewable here.

 

Are Labour At War With Poverty Or With Success?

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

 

Well, now we have it conclusively. It has nothing to do with making the rich in our society pay their “fair share”, no matter how loosely you define (or indeed blatantly misuse) the word “fair”. Nothing to do with ensuring that essential public services are funded, either. No, Ed Ball’s announcement of the Labour Party’s intention to reinstate their punitive 50% top marginal rate of income tax has everything to do with punishing people for daring to still be rich, for having the temerity to succeed.

Daniel Hannan MEP, writing in the Telegraph, ponders the cognitive dissonance behind a proposal to raise taxes without realistic hope of increasing revenues, and wonders if Labour are right to stake their electoral hopes on the British people being motivated primarily by envy and a desire for vengeance:

Labour doesn’t actually think the 50p tax rate will make Britain more prosperous. We know this because, for all but the last few weeks of its 13 years in office, it kept the top rate at 40p. Yet it now brazenly calls a 45p rate “writing a cheque to millionaires”. On one level, this is too silly for words: even if  everyone earning £150,000 were a millionaire, on no conceivable definition does demanding less money from someone constitute “writing a cheque”. But Ed Balls has presumably calculated, as Iain Martin adroitly observes, that there are enough votes in envy to cobble together a majority under the uneven constituency boundaries.

In another column he also reflects on the results of a YouGov poll showing that an overwhelming majority of Labour supporters believe that a 50p tax band should be brought back even if it was conclusively demonstrated that doing so raised no additional revenues. The telling visual is here:

YouGovTaxpoll

 

Hannan goes on in this second piece to explain the motivations that may cause people to vote as they did in the poll, and has the humility to accept that he (and others on the opposing side of the argument, myself included) probably suffer from similar confirmation biases and reverse rationalisation on this and other matters.

But the inescapable fact is that the motivation for supporting a revenue-neutral or revenue-negative tax increase comes largely down to envy, and that ugly part in the minds of some in the Labour Party (fully accepting that the Conservative Party has other ugly parts of its own) that would rather everyone in the country be worse off and more equal than better off and more unequal:

Envy is an ugly and debilitating condition, but it seems to have an evolutionary-biological basis. The dosage varies enormously from individual to individual, but even toddlers often display a sense that, if they can’t have something, no one else should either. If they had the vocabulary, they would doubtless, like the 69 per cent of Labour supporters, explain that emotion “on moral grounds”. Few toddlers, and few Labour voters, openly admit to being actuated by vindictiveness.

Most policy positions are an expression of some ingrained tendency. For example, we have an instinct to care for the vulnerable, and also an instinct to value reciprocity, and our welfare system results from an interplay between the two. Similarly, the current row about deporting foreign criminals has less to do with their numbers or the nature of their crimes than with our instinct – again, a human universal – about hospitality and its abuse. We shouldn’t be surprised when people who suffer from envy elevate it into a political precept and call it “fairness”.

The concept of fairness has been much abused by politicians (generally those on the left of the political spectrum), particularly since the start of the Great Recession. The worthy desire of Labour politicians to ease the crippling, painful effects of poverty on those less fortunate in our society is not in question, but it is disconcerting when they cling to the idea that punitively high, revenue-neutral tax increases will do anything at all to help the poor other than to cheer them up with the knowledge that wealthy people are also feeling the pinch.

And while we are quibbling about wording, Ed Balls needs to be taken to task in the media for characterising George Osborne’s decision to reverse half of Gordon Brown’s 50p tax hike to a slightly more palatable 45% top rate as a “massive tax cut”. If a five-point reduction in tax rates constitutes a massive tax cut, surely the ten-point increase in income tax instituted in the dying days of the Labour government of which he was a part could only be described, using the same dramatic language, as a gargantuan, devastating, apocalyptic tax increase? And yet, come general election season 2015, it is certain that we will not see Ed Miliband or Ed Balls’ faces smiling down at us from billboards promising “massive tax increases”.

But let us return once more to the YouGov poll results. No other mainstream British political party – not even the Liberal Democrats or the supposedly crazy UKIP – has a majority of their supporters who believe in raising taxes for the rich just to teach them the lesson that hard work does not and should not pay. That distinction is reserved for the Labour Party, a party whose leadership and supporters are now – quite cheerfully, openly and stridently – acting in a dangerously irrational way.

Irrational, that is, if we take them at their word that they have the best interests of all the British people at heart.

Britain’s Surveillance State Expands, Unnoticed

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Yesterday, David Cameron told the House of Commons Select Committee on National Security Strategy that he accepted that he and his government had thus far failed to make the case for the extraordinarily invasive government surveillance practices which have been secretly going on beyond the view of the public and our elected MPs, and that he and his ministers needed to do a better job selling the benefits of an intrusive, omniscient government to the British public.

So busy protecting us, he forgot to tell us precisely what he was doing in our name.
So busy protecting us that he forgot to mention precisely what he was doing in the name of our security.

The Guardian reported at the time:

Discussing the communications legislation, Cameron said: “Over time we are going to have to modernise the legislative framework and practice when it comes to dealing with communications data. It is a politically contentious topic. I am not sure we are going to make progress on it in the coming months in terms of legislation, but there may be things short of legislation that we could do.

“I do think politicians, police chiefs, the intelligence services have got a role in explaining what this is all about. Snowden inevitably raises questions about ‘who has access to my data and why’.

“But I am absolutely convinced that proper rules for communication data collection are essential. I do not think we have got across to people yet the absolute basis of this.

“In most of the serious crimes, such as child abduction, comms data – who called who when and where was the phone at the time, not the content of the call – the comms data is absolutely vital.”

It may well be the case that the majority of the most serious crimes are indeed solved by the analysis of telephony metadata by law enforcement agencies. But David Cameron is making an entirely separate argument here. No one is proposing that the police and other law enforcement agencies should be denied access to telephone and other digital records (which are already maintained by the telecoms companies for the purposes of billing) when investigating these crimes, because in these scenarios there will almost always be a suspect in custody or at large who has created reasonable suspicion and is then the target of the search.

What GCHQ and the NSA have been doing, on the other hand, is nothing to do with this standard law enforcement practice of searching the possessions and digital footprints of an active suspect. Rather, they have been collecting reams of metadata (and more) on people who are under no suspicion of doing anything at all, in secret and without permission, to dip in and out of at their leisure. By equating these two entirely different practices, Cameron is trying to make it sound as though people who value and speak out in defence of civil liberties are somehow extremists or absolutists who want to deny basic crimefighting tools to the police. This is clearly not so.

The false equivalence is made fully apparent in this next quote from Cameron:

He continued: “I love watching crime drama on the television, as I should probably stop telling people. There is hardly a crime drama that is not solved without using the data of a mobile communications device. If we don’t modernise the practice and the law over time we will have the communications data to solve these horrible crimes on a shrinking proportion of the total use of the devices.

The Prime Minister is basically saying that because telecoms companies and devices themselves only hold the most recent usage data, it is only through exercising powers of unlimited and total surveillance that the government can maintain a complete picture of a person’s communications, for use should they ever happen to become a suspect in a crime.

Note also that we are no longer even talking about terrorism, but just “horrible crimes”, among which the Prime Minister includes child abduction and a mysterious category of offence called “comms data”. It was bad enough when a government minister could mumble something inane involving the word “terrorism” to justify gaining complete access to a person’s communications and digital life, but through a couple of seemingly-innocuous turns of phrase it seems that David Cameron now wants to broaden the use of pre-emptive digital searches to stop any and all illegal activity. And since the government has no idea who may or may not be harbouring whims of child abduction or committing a ghastly act of “comms data”, the logical inference is that he believes that the security services are perfectly entitled to collect and monitor all of our telecommunications metadata now and forevermore, on the offchance that we do decide to commit one of these crimes.

Park your outrage for a moment, because the most incredible thing of all is not that all of this has apparently been occurring with regularity – that is, collection and use of the telephony metadata of British citizens, not just for counterterrorism and national security purposes but, in Cameron’s own words, also ostensibly to prevent child abduction and any number of other nominated crimes – but that in examining the actions and conduct of his government and himself, the only thing he can find to beat himself up about is the fact that he did not do a sufficiently vigorous job selling this flagrant intrusion of government into personal privacy to the British public.

Where is the oversight? Where is the outrage?

British Citizenship Now A Perk, Not A Right

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

The media has rightly devoted a lot of time and attention today to the fact that David Cameron’s authority was challenged by over 90 Conservative backbenchers who supported an amendment to the Immigration bill to make it harder for foreign criminals to avoid deportation by appealing to the European Court of Human Rights on the grounds that their right to a family life would be infringed.

Foreign criminals can stay; British citizens merely suspected of terror offences to lose their citizenship.
Foreign criminals can stay; British citizens merely suspected of terror offences to lose their citizenship.

The BBC’s Nick Robinson does a good job of unpacking the ludicrous exercise in Game Theory that led the various Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat factions to adopt their particular stances:

The home secretary believes that a proposal to give her stronger powers to deport foreign criminals is illegal, unworkable and may, in fact, lead to fewer deportations.

So, Conservative ministers have been ordered by the prime minister not to oppose it.

Yes, you read that right.

Despite all of the above David Cameron has told his troops to abstain rather than face headlines about a massive Tory revolt. He is said to be sympathetic to the aims of the backbench rebels who have refused to back down.

I personally fail to see why the Home Secretary or any elected politician should be personally involved in deciding deportation cases, in much the same way that I find it bizarre that they can determine whether or not to release prisoners serving life sentences. These matters should be non-political and sit with the judiciary, and while I am in favour of deporting foreign criminals I would much rather achieve this end by empowering judges and allowing them to apply clear legislation stating that criminal conviction of a non-citizen would result in the rescinding of the right to reside in the UK than by conferring even more powers on the Home Secretary to make life-and-death decisions over individual cases. But this is by the by.

The chicanery and slapstick attempts by the Home Secretary Theresa May and the party leadership to first outmanoeuver and then placate the rebellious backbenchers, some of which I personally witnessed from the public gallery of the House of Commons, are certainly newsworthy. But there is a real danger that the story will be framed as being primarily about Cameron’s leadership, or the potential impact of intraparty fighting on the Conservatives’ prospects at the next election, when something much more fundamental is also taken place. Namely, the fact that the bill, as it stands, would give government the power to strip a naturalised British citizen of their citizenship on the mere suspicion of being engaged in terrorist conspiracy.

The Guardian reports:

[Deputy Prime Minister Nick] Clegg said he supported the home secretary’s proposal to strip naturalised British citizens of their citizenship if they are judged to present a threat to national security. It would even apply to those who have no other citizenship, rendering them stateless.

He said the current laws had become a “passport for endless games in the courts to prevent people being deported that should be.

“We are tightening up the way the courts can interpret article 8, the right to a family life, so it cannot became an excuse for unjustified legal procrastination.”

Speaking on LBC’s Call Clegg, he added he knew the plan to make some naturalised British citizens stateless was controversial, but justifiable in a very small number of cases. He said the revocation of British citizenship “would apply in cases where individuals pose a real threat to the security of this country”.

“Judged” to present a threat to national security, but not convicted of any crime by a jury to back up the allegation. Perhaps this is just the inevitable next step given the fact that the British government for a long time also advocated control orders to keep terrorism suspects in a state of legal and personal limbo without giving them full legal due process.

Of course, Nick Clegg is eager to assure us that any cases of citizenship revocation will be extremely rare and only conducted in the gravest of circumstances – but since those circumstances would always be opaque to the general public, any words that he utters in support of this draconian and inhumane measure can be distilled into the much shorter phrase “just trust me”. He has given the British public no good reason to do so. And if the number of cases is really so small, what exactly is the compelling reason that they cannot have their day in court to determine their guilt or innocence of conspiring to commit terrorist acts? By Clegg’s own admission it certainly can’t be concern for the workload of the courts.

Fortunately the ever-watchful eye of Liberty, the National Council for Civil Liberties, picked up on what is happening and issued a stern public rebuke to the government, for what little good it will do:

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said: “Liberty always said that terror suspects should be charged and tried. First politicians avoided trials for foreign nationals; now they seek the same for their own citizens.

“This move is as irresponsible as it is unjust. It would allow British governments to dump dangerous people on the international community, but equally to punish potential innocent political dissenters without charge or trial. There is the edge of populist madness and then the abyss.”

It is tragically ironic that, if the bill passes in its current form, the law will grant a convicted foreign criminal the right to remain in the UK and avoid deportation because of a fictitious invented “human right” to remain with their family in a country not their own, while a legal, naturalised British citizen merely suspected of a terrorism offence stands to have their British citizenship revoked, potentially rendering them stateless.

Surely this is one civil liberty infringement and constitutional idiosyncrasy too far, even for our increasingly draconian, secretive national security State?

 

Note – The BBC’s Mark D’Arcy has an excellent explanation of the parliamentary rules and procedures which influenced the outcome of today’s parliamentary antics. The bill is currently at Report stage, the only opportunity for the entire House of Commons to debate the bill in detail and propose amendments, and at this stage it is essentially left to the whim of the Speaker, John Bercow, to determine which amendments are debated and vote on in the limited time available. If this doesn’t seem to you like quite the best way to scrutinise and amend new legislation, you are not alone in your thinking.

The Labour Party Wants To Criminalise Stupidity

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Hot off the press, we have the Labour Party’s next proposal to make Britain a happier, fairer, more green and pleasant land. Operating under the twin delusions that fastidiously tweaking laws will affect the behaviour of people who hold the law in zero regard in the first place and that there is no bad thing in the world that cannot be quickly put right through national legislation, Labour have decided that their path back to power lies in demonising adults who smoke in cars when minors are present, and vowing to include a pledge to Save The Children in their general election 2015 manifesto unless the coalition government takes action first.

Really, officer? I had no idea!
Really, officer? I had no idea!

The Guardian reports:

The shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham, said Britain should follow the example set by Australia, Canada and a number of American states.

He told Sky News, “When it comes to improving the health of children, we are duty bound to consider any measure that might make a difference.

“Adults are free to make their own choices but that often does not apply to children and that’s why society has an obligation to protect them from preventable harm.

“Evidence from other countries shows that stopping smoking in the confined space of a car carrying children can prevent damage to their health and has strong public support.”

I have no doubt that there may often be strong public support for not smoking in cars carrying children as Andy Burnham says, but he cleverly does not say whether or not there is equally strong support for actually legislating on the matter. Besides, if you are going to ban something it is generally best to have the means of monitoring compliance and enforcing the ban, significant details which are not mentioned in the amendment. Will a new branch of the British Transport Police be established to watch out for the tell-tale glow of a lit cigarette end in the presence of a child? And is the threat of a £60 penalty really going to change public behaviour?

If someone is so foolish as to smoke their child like a side of bacon in the car on the morning school run, the sad reality is that the unfortunate child is likely to come a cropper at the hands of their inept parents one way or another regardless of any heroic feats enacted on their behalf by a future Labour government. The dangers of second hand smoke have acquired such apocryphal universality that they are known by people who outwardly seem to know very little about anything – people who know nothing about nutrition, for example, can crack a “this counts as one of my five-a-day” joke when helping themselves to a strawberry jam doughnut or (in my case) a roll of Rowntree’s Fruit Gums.

People who subject their children to second hand smoke in the claustrophobic confines of a car know exactly what they are doing, and if they aren’t actively encouraging their children to poke metal objects into the electrical outlets at home then they almost certainly come close to that level of dereliction of parental duty in other areas as well.

Andy Burnham and Luciana Berger are clearly intent on proving themselves the “true guardians” of child safety, unlike the callous, horrible old Tory government. But there is only so much that members of Parliament, the police and the judiciary can do in their taxing role as parents-of-last-resort to a nation that is happy to keep breeding but less sure of how best to deal with the results and that awkward business of raising children.

Some acts are so evil, heinous or injurious to the public good that criminalising them is right and proper, and one of the correct functions of the legislature is to make sure that criminal law keeps up with these activities. And some other things are just plain stupid, and common sense tells any person in their right mind that to do those things would be ridiculous. Hermetically sealing your child in a vehicle and exposing them to tar and nicotine is just such a thing. The social disapprobation and public shunning of people who make their children passively smoke in cars is more of a deterrent than a £60 fine.

But while I have dwelled on the detail, Andrew Brown, writing in The Telegraph, gives the bigger picture reason why banning smoking in cars is not as noble or clever as its proponents make out:

There is a vital principle at stake: do we really want to live in a country where the state interferes to this degree in the minutiae of people’s daily lives and in private spaces like cars? The claim about protecting children is really just a Trojan horse to disarm opposition, as passive smoking was. Once people were persuaded that there was a risk of “passive smoking” (even though the risk is minimal or non-existent) then it was far easier to justify the smoking ban. If a law banning smoking in cars were to be passed, and the principle of “protecting third parties” conceded, where would it end? There would be no logical reason why the government couldn’t prohibit smoking in people’s houses where children are present. The public may tell pollsters that they support this kind of law, because it might sound plausible, but politicians have a responsibility to hold back the creeping tentacles of the meddling nanny state, not think up new ways to persecute private citizens.

Precisely. And if we really do need a Labour government to tell us that it might not be wise to give our children lung cancer and threaten us with slap-on-the-wrist penalties for doing so, then they have already achieved the kind of docile, unthinking, collectively dim and dependent society for which they sometimes – as they have done again today – so clearly and loudly agitate.