Comment: To bring back British freedom we have to sacrifice the welfare state
The desecration of the welfare state is the price we must pay for the return of civil liberties.
By Ian Dunt
The new ‘You Freedom’ website, where the public is encouraged to suggest how to improve the country, has three options: ‘restoring civil liberties’, ‘repealing unnecessary laws’ and ‘cutting business and third sector regulation’.
The association between civil liberties and business regulation is a false one. Freedom for the individual is quite different to freedom for an organisation, such as a company or a government – both entities which can easily extinguish individual freedom unless their powers are severely restricted.
But the coalition is desperate to present a coherent policy agenda, and the word freedom works particularly well. By associating the Lib Dems’ concern with civil liberties and the Tories’ desire to cut back on business regulation, Cameron and Clegg can secure a narrative. And to the two former-PR men, a narrative is worth its weight in gold.
Unfortunately, the word freedom is one of the most pernicious and misleading in politics. Alone, it is vacuous. Its only meaning follows from the words which come after it. Freedom to what? Kill? Maim animals? Buy a widescreen TV? Avoid taxes? Enjoy free medical care? Everyone wants freedom, but we all have different conceptions of which freedoms are most important.
The government’s view of private sector freedom is one that makes me deeply uncomfortable. On Budget day, I found Osborne’s statement to the Commons and Harriet Harman’s response both startlingly true. Osborne’s claim that the economic situation demands drastic action is clearly accurate. But Harman’s counter-claim that the Budget was a battering ram of ideology which the Tories would have attempted with or without the deficit also struck me as patently true.
The coalition government’s economic agenda is quite plainly an attempt to roll back the role of the state. Osborne envisages a Britain where a massive chunk of public sector jobs are transferred to the private sector. He wants a sea change in the way the country works. That is hugely problematic and it runs in the face of the evidence on offer. The private sector is, despite the myths spoken on its behalf by the media and the political class, often acutely inefficient. Quite how much more inefficient it is than the public sector is evidenced by the fact that our current financial difficulties are the result of its own insanity, not that of the public sector.
Osborne’s plans to force people, including single mothers, back to work would be fine if I believed the private sector offered fulfilling, well-remunerated work to those at the bottom of the pile. It doesn’t. To the unskilled it offers pittance and humiliation. It does not offer a ladder up to those on the minimum wage, except for a few with the right mixture of skill, luck and hard work. Osborne’s plan is all stick and no carrot.
Similar schemes in some states of the US, where private companies were paid by result to get single mums back to work, were a travesty. In a perverse result the companies became so obsessed with ticking boxes, and so numb to the social and emotional ramifications of their actions, that single mums were forced to travel up to two hours each way to do jobs that paid minimum wage. When kids see their only parent that little, simply to satisfy a deranged ideological fundamentalism, we all pay in broken families – and, eventually, Cameron’s broken society. The broken society is one where capitalism runs rampant, not the society which offers compassion and care to its people.
But that’s the price this country has to pay to stave off the greatest existential threat to its nature, to its soul: the dismantling of civil liberties, and the creation of a prototype police state.
Today, Human Rights Watch reiterated demands that the government hurry up and give up its stop-and-search powers. These are currently under review and have been declared illegal by the European court of human rights. For me, it’s fitting timing. It was the debate over police stop and search that turned my concern over civil liberties into something akin to a panic.
The case originally arose when Pennie Quinton and Kevin Gillanwere were subjected to stop-and-search and prevented from attending a protest against an arms fair in the Excel centre of London’s Docklands in 2003. Media interest and parliamentary questions eventually revealed that the whole of central London had been secretly designated a stop-and-search area since 2001. I remember learning that fact and feeling a sense of dread crawl up my spine.
Suddenly a clear and distinct secret government agenda could be discerned. DNA retention was expanded to innocent people without any legislation. Cameras were documenting billions of car journeys by scanning numberplates. CCTV on the street spread without any regulation whatsoever. Tony Blair started demanding 90 days of pre-charge detention, effectively scrapping Habeas Corpus. ID cards were coming in. There was a ban on demonstrations outside parliament.
It wasn’t that the government wanted to create a police state. It was just that it had so little respect for civil liberties that it paid no heed to the consequences of its actions. This was a vision of a country no Briton would ever recognise. A sinister, horrific, dangerous vision of Britain, which would have ruined all that makes the country great – or even tolerable.
Nothing was as important as this. We can debate matters of left and right until the end of time, but without freedom it is irrelevant. British freedoms come first, because they are what we use to debate all other issues.
The coalition government thinks rolling back the state in civil liberties is the same as rolling back the state in terms of regulation and public services. That is a profoundly childish assessment, which pays no heed to the qualitative differences between different state actions. It is ideological fanaticism, which favours words over reality. But it is an idiocy we will have to live with in order to get our country back.
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