UK, the cradle of democracy where the press is truly free. Long live the BBC.
Terror should not make us illiberal
New Labour must revisit its roots
Sunday January 4, 2004
The Observer
The grounding of British Airways flights to Washington and Riyadh because of undisclosed terrorist threats dramatises the emerging relationship between citizen and state.
Personal freedom, individual autonomy and maximum access to information have long been seen as desirable ends in themselves. But terrorism is revealing that we cannot expect total autonomy of individual action. Nor can we expect total knowledge. Our security depends on trusting governments to exercise their authority to save lives. Flights are cancelled with little or no explanation because the authorities judge that this is safer. We have no option but to trust them.
This is a rude challenge to the presumption of the age that individual judgments are always and everywhere better than those of government and state. Even the most ardent advocate of personal freedom and a minimal state would find it hard to devise a system where individual judgment should supersede that of the government over, say, the grounding of an aircraft on the basis of intercepted emails or telephone calls. Plainly, the balance of risk demands that the state plays its cards close to its chest.
Yet even against the menace of terrorism, we have to be vigilant that, in protecting its citizens, the state does not arrogate too much unaccountable power to itself. Already it is clear that the politics of the first decade of the twenty-first century will be about tracing the difficult-to-negotiate boundary between individual freedom and safeguarding our security. The year ahead will test our political establishment to the limit.
If the state is to act, to regulate and to enable in this environment, then it has to become better trusted and be seen as more legitimate. This month, the Hutton report will expose, just as other government inquiries such as the Phillips inquiry into BSE have done, how poor the political process and structure of government decision-making actually is. Action is deferred or postponed; information is manipulated; the prejudices of individual civil servants or Ministers, rather than considered appraisal, too often determine policy.
New Labour, before it took office, was an enthusiastic advocate of transparency and accountability. In office, it has converted to the caricature of the British state - that its vocation is to govern the great unwashed as it deems fit. This was never good enough, and will certainly not work today. It is tragic to watch the Lord Chancellor, Charlie Falconer - a smart, modern politician - trying to justify an unelected House of Lords.
In opposition, New Labour was also committed to a modernised British state achieving precisely the complex trade-off between individual freedom and collective security that our times now urgently require. New Labour must return to its roots - and quickly.
observer.guardian.co.uk |
