Taking Liberties
01 January 1991
Taking Liberties
bacdoc November=1991
Taking Liberties, by Andrew Puddephatt. CHARTIST, April/June
1990.
The eighties were a period when the Thatcher government took
liberties with and from British people. What rights have we lost,
how has democracy been undermined and What are the prospects for
the new decade.
In 1989 an astonishing wave of popular revolutions swept Eastern
Europe. Ordinary citizens, often led by the young, demonstrated
against their governments. One by one those governments toppled.
In celebrating the emergence of democracy it is interesting to
note some underlying themes. Solidarity in the early days between
1979 and 1981 pursued an unusual strategy confidently and
aggressively. It refused to adopt `political' demands and that
refusal to engage in politics was deliberate. It saw its job as
representation, not the seizure of power. The Polish Government
seeing little distinction between the state and society could not
understand Solidarity's project. A Polish writer, Jacek Kuron,
suggested that the Government/Party withdraw from certain areas
of social life retaining control only over the police, the army
and the central administration. The resulting vacuum was to be
filled by various social groups: intellectuals, church groups,
the media and arts, voluntary organisations - all the components
of what many can `civil society'.
Democracy was therefore not seen as a single celled organism
but a multi-cellular organism capable of articulating different
points of view and dissent from the government of the day. And
it is interesting that those social forces in the vanguard of
change in the East - churches,
intellectuals and independent trade unions - are the group most
held in contempt by Mrs Thatcher's government and which have been
subject to most intimidation in the last ten years.
This comparison is of interest because in the last ten years
the government has systematically harassed all of the insti-
tutions of civil society which have dared to be critical or stood
out against the government's policies.
NO FRAMEWORK
In Britain the institutions of civil society, be they churches
or trade unions or voluntary organisations, are particularly
important because unlike in many countries there is no
legislative framework guaranteeing citizens' rights. In British
law there are no rights, only a broad assumption that what is not
forbidden is allowed.
Through a complex mixture of statute and common law which has
developed haphazardly over the years we have arrived at our
current state of liberty. This is presided over by a judiciary
remarkable for the narrowness of its social base and whose
opinions and pronouncements continue to be a major source of
constitutional guidance. Perhaps it is not surprising that over
the last ten years there has been a systematic undermining of
human rights in this country. This is not a response to an
external threat from a foreign power or even against a serious
attempt to overthrow the state; it comes from an intolerance of
dissent and a willingness by the government to use its executive
powers to destroy opposition.
The government has undermined both individual rights,
collective rights and the rights of people to democratic partici-
pation in our society.
There is now an unprecedented level of individual
surveillance, harassment and invasion of privacy by the state.
The Observer in October 1988 claimed that, based on interviews
with British Telecom engineers, there had been a 50 per cent
increase in the number of engineers engaged in tapping telephones
and that 30,000 taps a year were currently being placed on the
lines of British citizens. The storage of information on people
by the police has increased massively; it is not just people who
are criminals or suspected of crime who are stored on the Police
National Computer (PNC). Anyone o interest can find that personal
details are logge