12.02.08

the end of british democracy. (or not.)

Posted in politics at 10:38 am by Rob Fahey

I really, really didn’t want to write anything about this topic, but today’s evening papers carried just enough utterly uninformed crud on the matter to make me annoyed enough to want to get it off my chest. Sorry to those in the line of fire (i.e. anyone still reading, having established that this is another post on politics).

Last week, a Conservative MP was arrested in a fairly heavy-handed manner by the police. He was arrested on suspicion of “conspiracy to cause misconduct in a public office”, a rarely used but relatively sanely worded offence which, in essence, seems designed as a bit of a catch-all with which to charge senior public figures who’ve been arranging to do naughty stuff like giving or accepting bribes. Note that it’s a “conspiracy” offence – a pretty specific term which means that you didn’t actually DO the naughty stuff, but you knowingly aided and abetted.

This chap, one Damian Greene, has suddenly become the heart of a great deal of chest-thumping and furious scribbling by the newspapers and the blogosphere alike. Apparently, his arrest is not only evidence that we live in a police state, it’s also a shocking assault on British democracy and of principles which date back to the very basis of our parliamentary democracy.

Now, let’s be perfectly clear here – our Labour government has absolutely no compunction about assaulting British democracy. Their attacks on the fairness of our judicial system, on the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, and on the role of Parliament in decision-making are grevious, well-documented and absolutely appalling. So from the outset, if there were to be an accusation of Labour using the police force for political dirty work… Well, I for one wouldn’t put it past them.

However…

Well, the “however” is a big one. There are two key problems with chest-beating over Damian Greene’s plight. The first is that it illustrates that British people don’t seem to know what a “police state” is, but we can forgive that on the grounds of exaggeration and hyperbole (in return for which, I demand a free pass next time I opine that Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre is definitely worse than Hitler).

The second, a bit more worrying perhaps, is that it illustrates an equal lack of understanding regarding their own history and the basis of parliamentary democracy.

Lots of newspapers and commentators have been shouting about Charles I – a particularly nasty and mentally unstable king with a proclivity for the more obscure and esoteric aspects of religion, who managed to precipitate a civil war and get his head chopped off when he attempted to assert the whole “Divine Right of Kings” nonsense and win absolute power back from the increasingly empowered parliament. Charles, you see, was told to bugger off when he tried to force Parliament to give up some of its MPs to his forces. “Aha!”, cry the budding historians in the papers, “This set a precedent of parliamentary privilege, which has just been broken! The end of all things is upon us!”

This proves, if any further proof were required, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Yes, Parliament told Charlie to sling his hook – but in doing so, they did NOT establish parliamentary privilege. In fact, Parliamentary Privilege then wasn’t terribly different to how it looks now – essentially, it guarantees a limited set of rights to MPs in the House, including important ones like freedom of speech… And freedom from arrest. “Oho!”, cry the newfound historical experts! Except that, er, that freedom from arrest doesn’t actually cover criminal matters. Damian Greene was arrested on a criminal matter. Equally, the Palace of Westminster is not, as such soi disant experts seem to believe, a church or cathedral in the 1500s. Criminals and criminal acts are not in some way “safe” within their walls, and police search rights and warrants apply there just as they do in any other office.

No “ancient and undoubted right” of the House of Commons has been breached. In fact, there’s essentially nothing unusual about what just happened – there have been similar cases scattered over the past century, at least half a dozen if not more. Few of them got very much airtime – but then again, few of them happened just when a government that was a dead-set to lose the next election suddenly looks like pulling some kind of strange victory from the jaws of defeat.

The funny thing is, there’s another aspect of Charles I’s unfortunate reign which is much more relevant to what has happened to Damian Greene. It came at the very end of his unpleasant life – when he got his head chopped off. In that action, Britain set a much more important precedent than the one Greene’s supporters claim – the principle that no man, not even the divine king himself, is above the law. The laws of the land apply equally to all, and police investigations must proceed on exactly that principle.

The other thing that the Damian Greene blowhards seem utterly outraged over is the idea that their man was arrested for “exposing” the Government – which is, of course, the duty of the Opposition.

Fine and good. If Damian Greene, or the police, turn around tomorrow and say “here’s the document they arrested me over – it’s information of great public interest which the Home Office tried to suppress for political reasons”, then neither I nor anyone else in the country will consider any further action against him even remotely justified. The man will be owed an apology by the Metropolitan Police, frankly.

To read the papers and the blogs, you’d think that has already happened. But… It hasn’t. In fact, we don’t know WHAT Damian Greene leaked, or tried to “groom” his Home Office source into leaking. Here, the waters are much muddier than the papers and the Conservatives would like us to believe.

The reality is that of the recent Home Office leaks, some are definitely public interest documents – but others are not. Others are personal details of cases the Home Office is working on, which have no right being in the public domain. Others still are more worrying – they’re internal Labour Party political documents, discussing the loyalty or affairs of various members of the party. My understanding is that they’re not really “Home Office” documents – they leaked from within that department, but they’re related to the Labour Party’s internal workings, not to the business of the Home Office itself. Their leaking isn’t in the public interest. It’s pure, brazen, political espionage.

If that’s what Damian Greene was up to, then he wasn’t acting in the public interest. Such actions are considered criminal in any sphere, and most certainly are not covered by parliamentary privilege. If the Met was made aware of solid evidence of that kind of action, then their course of action in this case was absolutely correct. If anything, the fact that our MPs can be investigated on matters like this is proof that our democracy still works, at least in some ways. The only way in which this is a harbinger of the sky falling in is the unfortunate fact that following this outcry, the Met will think twice about investigating political misdeeds in future – removing, with a deep sense of irony, yet another barrier to the abuse of our democracy.

Technorati Tags: Conservatives, Damian Greene, Labour, politics, Tories

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