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Shadow and Substance
December 02, 2001
By Denis Solomon
EVERY time you compare the operations of our pseudo-Westminster parliament with the workings of the genuine article, there is a lesson to be learnt.
After the United States, the nation most likely to suffer from terrorist attacks in the aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan is Britain. Certainly far more likely than Trinidad and Tobago.
Yet when the British government reacts with legislative proposals that threaten civil liberties, it encounters far greater difficulty than the government of Trinidad and Tobago ever did to its assaults on freedom of assembly with the Summary Offences Ordinance, freedom of speech and the press with the Equal Opportunities Act, and human rights in general by withdrawal from the American and International Human Rights Conventions.
Not that our government’s plans didn’t evoke protests from the press, the unions, and the general public.
But the greatest, because the most powerful, opposition to the British government’s proposals does not come from those quarters. So where does it come from? From Parliament.
And not only from the Parliamentary Opposition, but also, and principally, from the Home Affairs Select Committee, and from the House of Lords. The Home Affairs Select Committee is dominated by the governing Labour Party, to which Mr. Blunkett belongs. The composition of committees roughly reflects the composition of the House of Commons as a whole. In the House of Lords, despite ongoing constitutional changes, there are still enough Labour-appointed Life Peers to give the Labour Party a majority.
So therein lies the difference. Our House of Representatives is nothing but an extended Cabinet. Our Senate has a built-in government majority. But the British Parliament acts like a Parliament, and no matter how large the majority of the governing party, the government can never count on unquestioning acceptance of its legislative proposals. As for the House of Lords, not only do its members have minds of their own, but the great difference between it and our Senate is that although the Prime Minister can appoint Life Peers, he can’t fire them.
The anti-terrorism legislation being proposed by the Labour Government seeks to beef up the powers of the immigration service to detain suspected terrorists without trial. This would infringe the European Convention on Human Rights, whose provisions are now incorporated into British law.
At the same time, the Government is proposing a Bill to make it a crime, punishable by up to seven years’ imprisonment, to use language likely to incite hatred or violence against religious communities.
David Blunkett, the former Minister of Education who is now Home Secretary, has turned out to be quite a hawk in matters of national security. He is on record as saying that “airy-fairy” human rights concerns should not be allowed to prevent the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects.
He has not hesitated to criticise the Judiciary, telling them “not to use the Human Rights Act to overrule the House of Commons” (the Human Rights Act was passed into law under Mr. Blunkett’s own government), and expressing “astonishment” when a judge ruled that he could not ban Louis Farrakhan from Britain as a threat to public order.
Even the right-wing Daily Telegraph says that Mr Blunkett’s “natural—and in his case understandable—instinct to control the world around him” makes him see the judiciary as an enemy. The “in his case understandable” is a rather unkind reference to the fact that Mr. Blunkett is blind.
The Daily Telegraph legal correspondent goes on to point out that Mr. Blunkett had earlier made efforts to wrest control of the administrative service of the Courts from the Lord Chancellor, and that this suggests that he wants the power to shift not to Parliament but to his department.
On the other hand, Mr. Blunkett has declared himself ready to drop the draft law against incitement to religious hatred if the Lords rejects it. The Bill was a response to a request from British Muslim leaders after attacks on Muslims in the wake of September 11. It has attracted strong condemnation not only from MPs, including Labour MPs, as unworkable, but also from artists as an attack on their freedom to lampoon religious figures and practices, which they do with great regularity.
In fact, Jack Straw, Mr. Blunkett’s predecessor, shied away from introducing a similar law three years ago because the test of “incitement” was too subjective.
The parallel between Blunkett and Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj is obvious: hostility to judicial independence and desire to control the workings of the judiciary; pandering to religious groups (although Blunkett has fewer of them to conciliate, and, to his credit, his Bill also forbids incitement of hatred against “lack of religious belief”); contempt for international human rights agreements.
To complete the parallel, Blunkett is said to want to be Prime Minister.
But while Ramesh got his way in spite of widespread opposition, Blunkett will not. Opposition from judges, civil liberties organisations and the public to anti-democratic legislation is perhaps no stronger in Britain than it is here.
The difference is that in Britain, that opposition is channelled, focused and made effective by a functioning legislature, ready and able to transcend party allegiance in the interest of democratic principle.
Copyright © 2004 Denis Solomon