Tuesday - March 03, 2009

Big Brother Britain is a menace. The irony is, it’s the civil liberties lobby who are to blame.

I’ve only posted part ( a large part ) of her editorial here.
She speaks the truth and there isn’t anything for me to add. 

I hear her often on radio and I’d hate to be in a position where she was interrogating me.  She is one tough cookie let me tell ya.

BY MELANIE PHILLIPS, WRITING IN THE DAILY MAIL

Suddenly, a new political consensus appears to have emerged for the chattering classes. At the weekend, lawyers, celebrities, writers, politicians and lobbyists took part in a series of meetings across Britain, organised by the umbrella group Convention on Modern Liberty, to discuss their fears about the erosion of Britain’s historic rights and freedoms by the ‘surveillance society’.

The convention brought together such stalwart Lefties as the human rights lawyer Baroness Kennedy with the former Tory home affairs spokesman David Davis - who resigned his post specifically to devote himself to campaigning on the civil liberties issue.

We should be concerned about some of the ways in which freedom is being compromised. Some local councils are making wholly inappropriate use of anti-terrorist legislation to snoop on citizens, while other public bodies - such as the Charity Commission, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and the BBC - are able to make deeply questionable use of further surveillance powers.

There will soon be compulsory CCTV cameras tracking people as they shop in supermarkets for a bottle of wine, and pubs are being told they will only get a licence if they agree to train their security cameras on their customers.

The Coroners and Justice Bill will allow inquests involving matters of national security to be held in secret if ministers so decide. And the Home Office is planning a new ‘Intercept Modernisation Programme’ which will store details of every phone call, email and internet visit - a proposal condemned by Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, as ‘a step too far for the British way of life’.

These are very real concerns. But despite them, the campaigners’ argument is skewed. They claim that fear of terrorism has curtailed freedom.

But this ignores the role played by the civil liberties lobby in bringing about this state of affairs in the first place. For many of those now howling about the erosion of our ancient principles are the very same people who were behind the introduction of human rights law.

It may be thought a curious irony that the Human Rights Act was introduced in 1998 to tackle precisely the concerns expressed last weekend of a slide into tyranny - and yet liberty has been seriously eroded in the past decade.

In fact, this isn’t curious at all. Although the campaigners would sooner cut off their hands than admit it, the one has followed directly from the other. The idea that human rights law expands freedom was always a serious mistake. It has the opposite effect.

One of the main reasons the State has resorted to gathering intelligence within Britain on such an alarming scale is the collapse of the ability to control our borders. And that was brought about by the systematic refusal by the courts, on human rights grounds, to keep out or deport a range of undesirables.

The reason this country never had the identity card system common to so many European states was the fact that it used to have robust border controls. Once those barriers came down, the only way to protect the country’s security became internal surveillance.

Of course, this runs wholly contrary to the historic principles of English liberty. But that is the inevitable outcome of human rights law - which has ridden roughshod over those principles - because many of those now campaigning against the erosion of liberty also claim that ‘universal’ human rights principles trump Britain’s own.

Under that law, judges have been handed the power to balance rights against each other. And time and again, they have come down in favour of the rights of terror suspects, illegal immigrants and common criminals against the rights of indigenous, law-abiding people. So it’s a bit rich for the liberty campaigners to claim that fear of terrorism has eroded human rights.

THE REST OF ARTICLE HERE

Posted by peiper     on 03/03/2009 at 11:05 AM   
Filed Under: • Editorials • UK •  
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