SPEECH: David speaks in the Commons about control orders.
David has spoken in the House of Commons about control orders. His opening contribution was as follows:
Rt Hon David Davis: My right hon. Friend has talked about the problems of high principle with this issue and he is now discussing the legal problems, but I should like to draw his attention to one simple practical point. We were led to believe that thousands of people would be subject to these control orders when the legislation went through the House in 2005, but that has not turned out to be the case. Some 45 people have been subject to such orders and of those 45, seven have absconded. One would think that the seriously dangerous al-Qaeda terrorists would be the ones who would abscond, which indicates that this regime is not just flawed, but totally useless.
As a rule I hate personality politics. It is almost always nasty, and invariably leaves a sour taste. But there is no doubt the character of the various political leaders will form a large part of the judgment exercised by the British people in the general election. The revelations of the last week about Gordon Brown's character have made this even worse.
There is a good reason for the British instincts in this. The personality of our prime minister is more important to the country than any other Western head of government. Constitutionally, the prime minister has enormous power. But through a quirk of British history, this power is exercised through machinery that is positively rickety.
The prime minister's support staff can be crammed into the small townhouse that is 10 Downing Street. The "powerhouse" that runs our government largely consists of a small crowd of civil servants sitting at desks crammed into two offices that adjoin the cabinet room.
As a result of this almost amateurish setup, the authority and personality of the prime minister is the single most important influence on the effectiveness of the government. So, under Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, Whitehall worked well. We may not like what it delivered, but at least it did deliver. Prime ministers whose authority becomes damaged lose their grip. It happened to John Major, and it is happening to Gordon Brown.
So I suspect the battle of the next few months will be nominally about policy, but actually about character. Now, l do not believe that one personality is intrinsically better than another. There is much to admire in both David Cameron and Gordon Brown. Indeed I remember how I felt for each of them, and admired their dignity and courage, when they both lost children in the full glare of public scrutiny. Nor do I blame Mr. Brown for talking about his loss. Regrettably that is inevitable in today's intrusive media world. The question is not about some innate virtue. It is about who is best fitted to fill the most important office in the land.
Nor was even this narrow question always obvious. When Brown took over, I was in the Shadow Cabinet. I thought at that time that there was an appetite among the British people after a decade of Blairite spin, for a leadership with high policy, high gravitas, and low spin, and I feared that Brown might present himself in that light, which would have made him a formidable PM. Indeed, for three months it looked like exactly that was happening.
Then, as we all know, normal service was resumed. What has happened since to expose Gordon Brown's character will determine the outcome of the next election. More than the slump, more than the 13 wasted years, the character of the prime minister will determine how people vote.
Now, I suspect that the accusations of bullying are overblown. The demands of No. 10 are ferocious on all who work there. The consequences of error are enormous for the country as a whole. So perfectionism is a job requirement.
Equally necessary is the need to work calmly under enormous pressure, as is the confidence to delegate effectively, and the ability to withdraw from the details and focus on the bigger picture. This is where the recent revelations show the most worrying weakness. So while the allegations of bullying are probably wrong, the suspicions of inadequacy are not.
We should remember that we do not make these judgments alone. Our international allies make them, and decide whether they can rely on us as a result. This has a direct impact on our national interest. For example, a recent book about Gordon Brown told us how he lost his temper at an official banquet over seating arrangements. That a prime minister should sulk through such an event and stalk out early over such a triviality is scarcely believable. It cannot have impressed our American allies, a view that would have been reinforced by his behavior demanding meetings with the U.S. president at a recent Washington conference.
It is also a necessary quality of a prime minister that he be a leader, a man whom people will follow through adversity and trouble. This means he has to be able to inspire loyalty. That means he has to reciprocate loyalty, and deal fairly with his supporters. He certainly cannot rely on "fear of the Brown machine," which many Labour MPs tell us has been a characteristic of the last decade.
The book "Inside Out" tells how Mr. Brown was willing to sacrifice its author, Peter Watt, to possible prosecution over "donorgate." This appears to have been a concerted character assassination designed purely to save the prime minister's own skin, and for the government to save face. This cowardly treatment is hardly a characteristic that people would look for in a leader.
The fact that any number of people have been willing to write or brief against him reinforces that view. Even one of Brown's closest allies in the house, Douglas Alexander, has said he doesn't actually like him and feared that "the longer the British public had to get to know him, the less they would like him as well." The ferocious rages, the sullen sulks, the disorganization, the inability to hold the loyalty of his staff, all tell us what Alistair Campbell meant when he called him "psychologically flawed."
When political parties are fighting over the center ground, as they will be in this election, the ideological distinctions between them become blurred in the public eye. That inevitably leads the electorate to make their judgment on personality more than policy. They also know we face tough times, a period of crisis, pressure, and vital decisions. They will be looking for courage, conviction, and character.
In many walks of life, Gordon Brown would be a towering figure. In the role of prime minister he is simply inadequate, and what I am hearing on the streets of Britain tells me the British people know it.
ARTICLE Update: Our courts must stand up to the bullies
This article appeared in 'The Times' on Monday 15th February 2010.
If you listen to government ministers and their supporters, you might be forgiven for thinking that the behaviour of the British courts in the Binyam Mohamed case was unusually aggressive, unique even. You might be led to believe that our courts were alone among the judiciary of America’s allies in their challenge to torture and rendition.
You would be wrong. Indeed, by comparison with Canada, Germany and Italy our courts have been courteous to the point of deference to the Foreign Secretary and, through him, the US authorities.
Courts in Canada, Germany and Italy have been vigorous in upholding the rights of suspects not to be abducted and tortured, and in making public information about the actions of their own and the US intelligence services, where appropriate. I have been unable to find any threats by America to withhold intelligence co-operation from these allies. Nor have I been able to find allegations by their governments that their courts are dupes of al-Qaeda, the line peddled by Whitehall last week.
The Canadian courts have gone so far as to release video footage of an alleged terrorist, Omar Khadr, being interviewed by Canadian intelligence officers in Guantánamo, showing him breaking down in tears. This was against the wishes of the Canadian and US governments.
More dramatic still was the case of Maher Arar. A dual-nationality Canadian of Syrian origin, he was stopped while passing through New York, on information provided by the Canadian Secret Intelligence Service. He was not sent to the Canadian border, but to Syria. The Syrians tortured him for ten months before returning him to Canada.
The Canadian Government instituted a judicial inquiry, which found that Mr Arar had been tortured and cleared him of terrorism. The Government apologised and the Commissioner of the RCMP, the Canadian police, resigned.
The sensitivity of the Americans to this case led them to invoke a secrecy clause known as State Secrets Privilege against Arar in a US court case. This is something they did not do in the US case involving Binyam Mohamed.
But the Canadians are as nothing compared with the German courts in the case of Khalid el Masri. This Kuwaiti-born German citizen was picked up in Macedonia by a CIA snatch team and spirited away to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan. Here, he claims, he was beaten and abused. It seems likely that the CIA decided that they had got the wrong man, as they dumped him, penniless, on a road in Albania. Again the Americans used State Secrets Privilege to prevent the release of information in a case brought in the US courts by Mr el Masri.
On January 31, 2007, the Munich prosecutor issued arrest warrants for 13 CIA agents on information provided by the authorities in Spain, where the rendition flight is said to have originated. Those cases have not been pursued. However, in November last year, the Italian courts found 23 CIA agents guilty of abducting a suspect in Milan and taking him to Egypt for torture.
I, for one, prefer our own courts’ more measured approach. But consider how The New York Times compared the Italian decision with their own courts’ refusal to deal with the Maher Arar case: “The Italian court got it right,” it said. “The American court got it miserably wrong.”
So where does this leave the British courts? First we should understand that British courts recognise that in a democracy secretaries of state are appointed to exercise their judgment. You can see this in the almost excruciating lengths to which last week’s judgment went to give the Foreign Secretary the benefit of the doubt. It put the kindest interpretation on everything.
Second, it demonstrates how implausible is the threat to withhold intelligence co-operation. Will the Americans really cut off co-operation with Britain, Canada, Germany and Italy, just because their courts uphold standards we are all supposed to believe in?
Third, it demonstrates quite how disgraceful the Whitehall-inspired attack on our judges last week was. Far from being irresponsible, the judges were being the model of calm judicial reasonableness.
Of course, stories of rendition and torture are a propaganda gift to our enemies. But the authors of that gift, are the members of Western intelligence agencies who precipitated those barbarous actions, and all who acquiesced in their doing so.
It is categorically not the responsibility of those — be they judges, lawyers, campaigners, journalists or politicians — who seek to expose and correct these errors. Indeed, it would be a further propaganda gift if we compounded one departure from civilised standards on torture with another from our standards of impartial justice and open democracy.
Today the Appeal Court begins considering fresh submissions on whether to publish the paragraph expressing its critical judgment of the intelligence agencies. I hope it decides to do so, not because I wish to see that criticism, but because it will demonstrate the independence of our courts from political bullying.
Whatever it does, it will not close this issue. The only thing that will do that will be a full judicial inquiry. This is not an issue that should be resolved by grinding through large numbers of civil court actions. That will paralyse the agencies. An inquiry, with instructions to be as transparent as possible within the limitations of protecting national security, will be quicker and more effective in ensuring that justice is done and that the West never makes this terrible mistake again.
David's New ARTICLE: Eurozone mess shows UK was right not to join
This article appeared in 'The Evening Standard' on Thursday 4th February.
The government tells us that we are out of recession - but only by one tenth of one percent growth. Any smaller and it would have vanished all together. After the brutal negatives of the last year, our economy could not get any more fragile. Or could it?
What if we had been a member of the Eurozone? Had we been in the euro these last few years, our economic state would not be a disaster, it would be a catastrophe. Our already damaged economy would have been crippled by a fixed exchange rate set by the so-called "successes" of the financial sector.
Instead, when our financial sector collapsed, the pound fell.
Outside the euro, sterling has been trading at a competitive level in global currency markets. British exports remained at attractive prices while euro-denominated goods raced to all-time highs against the pound and the dollar in 2009. This is the main reason we had a record manufacturing upturn in January, and without the beginnings of that upturn we would have still been in recession. In Greece, Ireland and Spain, all in the eurozone, manufacturing is struggling. The biggest of these, Spain, is unlikely to see an economic recovery this year.
So managing our own currency is critical to our ability to compete. Giving up our currency would also have meant giving up to the European Central Bank our ability to control interest rates. The ECB has kept interest rates significantly higher than rates in the UK.
The Bank of England has kept our rates low and pumped money into the economy, allowing companies to absorb the shock of recession and start to recover. None of this would have been possible had we joined the euro.
Those countries in the eurozone whose governments have, like Gordon Brown, behaved in a profligate manner, are now paying a fearsome price.
As well as the higher ECB base rate, they are being punished by the bond traders who are charging them for the riskiness of their national balance sheets. Greece, for example, is facing some of the highest interest rates for a decade, and is finding it hard to compete for funds with other eurozone countries.
What is worse, before the current crisis, membership of the eurozone lulled Greece into a false sense of security. Leading up to the budget problems in Greece, their government bond yields barely indicated the growing risk of Greek debt. The market was distorted, failing to convey information about the state of finances in Greece.
Even worse, the rest of the eurozone has been subsidising the bloated spending programmes of the Greek government, offering them no incentive to restrain extravagant and sumptuous behaviour.
This may well be why the Greeks were the first European nation to have their credit rating downgraded. Had we been a member of the euro, we would have suffered a similar fate. To add insult to injury, like Greece, had we been in a similar fix, we would have been denied balance-of-payments aid.
We have our own house to put in order, and that is not something we should entrust to a system controlled by foreign states who, quite reasonably and properly, have interests other than our own.
The UK currently ranks 126th out of 133 countries analysed for the soundness of their banks, according to the World Economic Forum. Our banks are amongst the most likely in the world to become insolvent and require a government bailout. Our national finances are in a parlous state.
Yet unlike the Eurozone countries of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain, our national credit rating has not been downgraded.
Do we want to find our banks, not to mention the families and businesses they serve, in the same position as these governments, trusting their livelihood to Eurocrats, when the financial markets themselves do not trust them?
About 15 years ago, I was one of a team determined to keep us out of the euro. We were influenced by a hard-headed consideration of all the previous attempts to bind the currencies of disparate economies together. Most had crashed and burned at the first stress on the system.
The euro is facing its first stress-test since its adoption in 1999, with the looming financial problems of Greece, and now Ireland, Portugal and Spain, all testing the euro's ability to absorb shocks during a recession. We have yet to see the conclusion of this continent-wide experiment.
For ourselves, the pound has served our country well over the past ten years, in the good times and in the bad. Sterling is helping pull us out of the recession. This is no time to abandon a steadfast friend.
David's Latest ARTICLE: Gordon Brown's Cynical Electoral Ploy
This article appeared in 'The Wall Street Journal' on Thursday 4th February.
Sometimes it seems that Gordon Brown has no sense of shame. This week, in the name of re-establishing the trust of the public in democracy, he proposed the most shamelessly cynical and undemocratic ploy that I have seen for some time. That the proposal was about tactics not principle was demonstrated by one of his own cabinet ministers who told a journalist that it was intended to "f*** up the Tories."
The idea—to have a referendum on introducing an alternative voting system for general elections—masquerades as a form of proportional representation. With it he hopes to seduce the Liberal Democratic Party onto his side, either now or perhaps in a hung Parliament after a referendum. His main problem is that his own party hates proportional representation.
The proposal, Alternative Voting (AV), is a system whereby constituents rank the parliamentary candidates and the losers are eliminated, and the votes redistributed until one contender achieves more than 50%. It is not proportional representation. Indeed Roy Jenkins, when asked by Tony Blair to devise a PR system for the U.K., dismissed AV as offering "little prospect of a move toward greater proportionality and in certain circumstances it has even less proportionality than first past the post."
Labour Party members like AV because they see it as an anti-Tory voting system, in which they believe Liberal Democrat voters are more likely to vote Labour than Tory, because both are essentially left-wing parties.
Nevertheless, many Labour MPs are suspicious of this proposal because they think it is likely to be a stepping stone to full-blooded proportional representation. They are right to worry.
PR is, generally speaking, not particularly representative, not particularly democratic, not at all transparent, and neither necessarily stable nor decisive.
It invariably leads to coalition governments, formed by deals in smoke-filled rooms out of sight of the public and beyond the control of the electorate. The result may bear little resemblance to the manifestos that people cast their vote on. The ensuing Government is almost always a compromise, and is therefore rarely decisive (as in most European countries), or it may be unstable (as sometimes happens in Israel). No coalition government, no system of proportional representation, would have delivered a Margaret Thatcher to resolve the problems of a failing country—indeed of a failing political class. Only a first-past-the-post system could have done that.
Even more important, the first-past-the-post system creates a strong link between the MP and their constituency. This is good for democracy, and it is also good for the independence of the MP. In all PR systems, the political party chooses, ranks, and thereby controls the MP. The sorts of mavericks and independent spirits that lead to great political innovations are generally removed from the system by the party machine. In a first past the post system the constituency link gives the MP authority independent of the party to which he belongs.
I am acutely conscious of this. When I forced a by-election 18 months ago to fight against the government's authoritarian policies, I did not need to seek the approval of my party—although it was supportive. I was able to fight the seat with money, workers, and publicity engendered by the cause, not the party. That in turn gave great authority to the battle of ideas over the liberty agenda, and the government has folded on virtually every count as a result. None of this would have been possible under most PR systems.
This level of individualism is also deterred under the AV system. People occasionally say it would stop extremist parties. True, but first past the post does that. But what about the Greens, the Scottish and Welsh nationalists, the individual single-issue candidates? All of these are perfectly legitimate causes, and all, early on, would have been crushed by the coalition of establishment parties under AV.
What about fairness, some may say? Of course the first past the post system is unfair occasionally, as are all systems. Its principal unfairness however is against my party, the Conservatives. It was this unfairness that allowed the Labour Party to form a comfortable majority government with 35.3% of the vote in the last election. I must say that I have not noticed Mr. Brown rushing to correct this weakness in the system.
The sheer scale of this imbalance is breathtaking. It is caused by differences in sizes of constituencies and distribution of votes. To understand it, imagine the major parties having, respectively 40% and 30% of the vote, with the Liberals at 18%. If the Tories have the 40% share, they have a majority of 8. If Labour has the 40% share, they have a majority of 128—an astonishing advantage of 120 seats.
It would be remarkably easy to put right, by recalibrating the size of the constituencies. So my constituency, Haltemprice and Howden, is just over 70,000 votes. Labour's Sheffield Brightside, the constituency of my old Home Office opposite number David Blunkett, is just over 50,000. There is no conceivable justification for this, and I would expect a new Conservative government to correct it when they cut the number of MPs by 10%, as they have pledged to do. While this would not eliminate the disparity, it would reduce it dramatically.
Even with his current 8-10% advantage, Mr. Brown is expecting to lose next time. This is why he is indulging in this grubby ruse, trying to set up the conditions to hang on to power in a hung parliament. It will not work. The reason it will not work is because this latest episode is just one more example of why the British people want rid of him. He is a man who will put tactics before principle, political advantage before national interest, at every turn. And in May 2010 the electorate will decide, enough is enough.
SPEECH: David speaks about Binyam Mohamed in the House of Commons
During a debate in the House of Commons, Secretary of State for The Foreign Office David Milliband made the following statement:
“With permission, Mr. Speaker, I would like to make a statement to the House on the case of Mr. Binyam Mohamed following the judgment handed down this morning in the Court of Appeal.
The Court of Appeal has ruled that, in the light of disclosures by a United States court in December 2009, which I shall describe below, the seven paragraphs that have been redacted from the original judgment of the divisional court in this country of 21 August 2008 should be published. The seven paragraphs contain summaries of American intelligence relating to Mr. Mohamed's case held in UK files. I accept the Court's ruling, which concludes a very complex, and in various ways apparently unique, case, and I have made the relevant paragraphs available this morning on the Foreign Office website. The judgment is significant not just in respect of the seven paragraphs but for important principles that are at the very heart of both our national security and our democracy.
The facts are as follows. Mr. Mohamed, an Ethiopian national formerly resident in the UK, was detained in Pakistan in 2002. In 2004, he was transferred to Guantanamo Bay. In August 2007, the then Home Secretary and I wrote to the US Secretary of State to seek Mr. Mohamed's release from Guantanamo Bay and his return to the United Kingdom, along with four other UK residents. Mr. Mohamed was released from Guantanamo a year and a half later, in February last year.
In May 2008, Mr. Mohamed brought proceedings against the British Government in an effort to secure disclosure to his legal counsel of any material held by the British Government that might assist in the defence of his case before a US military commission. The question at issue in our appeal against the judgment of the divisional court was not this disclosure, which we supported and secured. It was instead whether intelligence provided, on a confidential basis, by one state to another, in absolute trust that it would be kept secure, should be disclosed into the public domain in the interests of open justice; or whether the breach of trust would be so grave as to endanger intelligence-sharing relationships and therefore affect national security. As I have said in this House on a number of occasions, in this case it was US intelligence and an English court, but it could just as easily be British intelligence in a foreign court. As I have also said to the House, often, at issue in this case was not the content of the seven paragraphs, but the principle of their disclosure by an English court against US wishes.
I am grateful for the consideration that the Court of Appeal gave to the control principle. This principle, which states that intelligence belonging to another country should not be released without its agreement, underpins the flow of intelligence between the US and UK. This unique intelligence-sharing relationship is vital to national security in both our countries. Crucially, the Court has today upheld the control principle. The judgment describes that principle as integral to intelligence sharing. It specifically vindicates the careful assessment that releasing the seven paragraphs without the consent of the United States would have damaged the public interest. It also specifically makes clear that"“this litigation has endorsed the application of public interest immunity and the maintenance of confidentiality over secret information.”"
This is important for the future of intelligence-sharing with the US and others.
However, on 17 December last year, we received notice of a US court ruling in the case of another Guantanamo detainee, Farhi Saaed Bin Mohammed, which made a finding of fact in respect of Binyam Mohamed's allegations of mistreatment. That judgment does not set out the content of the seven paragraphs per se, but it does include references to the treatment of Mr. Mohamed covered in the seven paragraphs. We brought this to the attention of the Court of Appeal and Mr Mohamed's counsel immediately. The Court of Appeal today ordered the publication of the seven paragraphs because, in its view, their contents were placed into the public domain by a United States district court. Without that disclosure, it is clear that the Court of Appeal would have upheld our appeal and overturned the fifth judgment of the divisional court. The Court of Appeal was also clear that the judiciary should overturn the view of the Executive on matters of national security only in the most exceptional circumstances. It states that"“it is integral to intelligence sharing that intelligence material provided by one country to another remains confidential to the country which provided it and that it will never be disclosed, directly or indirectly by the receiving country, without the permission of the provider of the information. This understanding is rigidly applied to the relationship between the UK and USA.”"
I spoke last night to Secretary Clinton about this case, which has been followed carefully at the highest levels in the US system with a great deal of concern. Recent events have shown the importance of the US-UK intelligence relationship in the fight against terrorism; equally, the determination of the US authorities to protect the confidentiality of their intelligence has been absolute throughout this case. We will work carefully with the US in the weeks ahead to discuss the judgment and its implications in the light of our shared goals and commitments.
Mistreatment of prisoners, not to say torture, violates the most basic principles of this country, never mind our national and international legal obligations. There is a fundamental commitment on the part of myself, responsible for the Secret Intelligence Service, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, responsible for the Security Service, and the heads and staff of those agencies, to uphold the highest standards of conduct not just for ourselves but with the countries with which we co-operate.
A wide range of allegations have been made during the course of this case. Today some of the facts can be publicised, in some cases for the first time. First, the paragraphs released today describe information received by our intelligence agencies concerning the conditions of Mr. Mohamed's detention by the United States in Pakistan in April 2002. They note specifically that he was subject to sleep deprivation, threats and inducements, that he was held shackled, and that the treatment, were it conducted by the United Kingdom, would be contrary to undertakings first given to this House in 1972. I repeat that it was not conducted by the UK.
Secondly, now that they are in the public domain, it will be evident that the paragraphs do not contain information on Mr. Mohamed's most serious claims of mistreatment, notably in respect of alleged genital mutilation, during his detention until his release from Guantanamo last year. We, the United Kingdom, have no information to corroborate those allegations. Those matters have quite properly been raised by Mr. Mohamed in his civil claim for damages and will be addressed there.
Thirdly, during the course of these proceedings, allegations of possible criminal wrongdoing by a British official were made. The Home Secretary referred them to the Attorney-General for her consideration, and they are now the subject of a police investigation.
The most basic values of this country are at issue in the debate that will follow the Court's decision today. Our position is clear: the UK firmly opposes torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment. This is not just about legal obligations, it is also about our values as a nation and what we do, not just what we say. We have taken a leading role in eradicating torture internationally, both through organisations such as the United Nations and by assisting other countries. Where possible wrongdoing is found, it is fully investigated.
I also want to place on record the fact that we are lucky to have the best intelligence agencies in the world. Their staff are second to none in their commitment and public service. They are respected across the world, and the work that they do to keep Britain safe deserves all our admiration and gratitude.
There is a fundamental myth that needs to be addressed, which is that the security services operate without independent oversight. Ministers and agency heads have the first responsibility for the conduct of their organisations. The Intelligence and Security Committee provides parliamentary scrutiny of agency activities, and independent judicial oversight is provided by the commissioners, who by law must be given access to whatever documents and information they need. Both report annually to the Prime Minister and to Parliament. Then there are the courts, whose role is to protect the rights of individuals and provide recourse to justice when they believe they have been infringed. That they have done, and continue to do, in this case.
Today's judgment is not evidence that the system is broken. Rather, it is evidence that the system is working and that the full force of the law is available when citizens believe that they have just cause. The six judgments in this case, plus a closed judgment, show a seriousness of purpose in our legal system that is a vital part of our system of accountability. We have fought this case and brought the appeal to defend a principle that we believe is fundamental to our national security—that intelligence shared with us will be protected by us. No one likes to lose a case, but the force of the judgment is that it firmly recognises that principle. In doing so, the Court is fulfilling its vital constitutional role, protecting this country and upholding the law.”
David was amongst the members who responded, saying;
“May I thank the Foreign Secretary for making this statement, because it is good that he did so? Just before he stood up earlier, The Guardian published on its website a copy of a letter from Jonathan Sumption QC, his lawyer, raising the matter that the Government are still seeking a redaction—it would appear—from the judges' rulings. I shall read the Foreign Secretary the following short extract from that long letter:"“The Master of the Rolls's observations…are likely to receive more public attention than any other part of the judgments. They will be read as statements by the Court (i) that the Security Service does not in fact operate a culture that respects human rights…(iii) that officials of the Service deliberately misled the Intelligence and Security Committee on this point (iv) that this reflects a culture of suppression in its dealings with the Committee, the Foreign Secretary and indirectly the Court, which penetrates the service to such a degree as to undermine any UK government assurances based on the Service's information and advice; and (v) that the Service has an interest in suppressing information which is shared…by the Foreign Office for which he is responsible.
Will the Foreign Secretary comment on that?”
To which Mr. Milliband replied:
“I will comment on it, but it is very important that the facts are on the record, not the allegations, and I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will allow me to go through this. First, it is not correct to say that the Government or, more specifically, the counsel for the Government, sought redactions of the judgment. A redaction suggests that we wanted an item deleted that we accepted was true. Once our counsel had been provided with a copy of the judgment in draft, as is normal practice, he had a real concern that one paragraph set out conclusions that went beyond the evidence presented and raised prejudice in respect of the ongoing case involving witness B. He took the view that that should be brought to the attention of the judges in the case. The three judges examined that letter and decided to amend the paragraph so that it took the final form that it did; the court concluded that the concern was well founded, so it revised its paragraph in the light of it.
It is very important that we also remember that in open court today the counsel for Mr. Mohamed apologised unreservedly for releasing this private legal document—it is a normal part of legal practice that such correspondence should take place. It is also important that no suggestion is made anywhere to impugn the integrity of the judiciary in making their own judgments. What the judiciary say in a draft judgment or in a final judgment is their business, and their independence is at the heart of their final words. The words that appear today in public are those of the justices in the case, and it is their decision to release them on that basis.”
David's New ARTICLE: Marriage just wasn't a choice for my mother
This article appeared in 'The Observer' on Sunday 24th January.
When I was conceived, in the late 1940s, my mother faced a dreadful set of choices. Her lover was a married man and to all intents and purposes abandoned her. The stigma on single mothers in those days was so fierce that for many young women, maybe most, the next step was the dangerous one to an illegal, backstreet abortionist. For those who could not bring themselves to take that awful course, the standard alternative was to have the baby and give it away for adoption immediately after the birth.
One of the reasons I have always admired my mother is that she had the courage to resist those ferocious social pressures and keep me. The battle between social stigma and a mother's love for her child must have been agonising. Nobody I know of in the Tory party wants to go back to those days. Or if they do, they keep quiet about it around me.
But none of that gainsays a single, overwhelming set of facts. Children do well when they are brought up by two parents in a long-term stable relationship. On average – and only on average – married couples stay together for longer than unmarried ones. So, on average, children do better when their parents are married. There are plenty of exceptions, of which more in a moment, but that is the average.
The job of government is to improve the average outcome for everyone, without visiting injustice on anyone. In this area of policy, that is clearly difficult. It is made more so by the fact that there are a vast variety of different family circumstances.
Take the category of single mothers alone. The common assumption is that they are mostly young teenagers who are careless or who even deliberately get pregnant as a step to a council flat and a benefit cheque. Of course there are young women who do that – and some who follow it up by having other children by other fathers. The prospects for their children are often dire. These are all too often the children who fill the care homes or end up being abused by the peripatetic fathers. At the extreme end of this spectrum we find the Baby Peters and the Victoria Climbiés.
But that is not the typical single mother by a long chalk. Single mothers come in a wide variety of categories. There are married mothers who are separated or divorced from their husbands. There are single mothers who decide to have a baby, but who are capable of providing for that child, both financially and emotionally. Then there are widows.
The fact that the policy area is difficult is not an excuse for avoiding it. As it stands, from a social policy perspective, our tax and welfare system is at best chaotic and at worst perverse. The tax credit system clearly penalises couples over single parents. This leads many couples to pretend to live apart – the notorious "living apart together" scam. I have heard estimates that 200,000 people are in this category. This puts a tax not just on marriage, but on having any stable relationship. In fact, it criminalises relationships by leading people to lie about their status.
This nonsense has to go. Similarly, I want to see the tax system recognise and reinforce marriage. This is not, for me, an issue of morality. People's moral choices are nothing to do with the state. It is simply an issue of reinforcing what works best for most children in most circumstances.
In the party political spat over marriage and tax in the last two weeks, David Cameron volunteered that he had "messed up." While this was a gracious thing to say, I am not sure that I agree. Tactically, he may have created a problem, but strategically I think the Conservative party is in the right place.
Few people are more pro-marriage than me. I want the Tories to implement policies that favour marriage, both symbolically and practically. In my mind, to be pro-marriage is to be pro-children. But a tax break is no use if you do not have a job. So the need to balance the books must take priority over social aims. Recessions do not help marriages. In my grandmother's words: "When money troubles come in the door, love goes out of the window."
So it may take time to deliver a pro-marriage tax and welfare policy. So what? In my view, that is a good thing. This is a policy whose social impact will take more than a decade to pay off and it is vital that we get it right. So a year or two does not matter.
When he became chancellor, Gordon Brown was warned that the tax credit policy was prone to fraud, error and waste. He ignored the many warnings and rushed ahead. For more than a decade, poor families have had reason to regret that haste.
To illustrate how difficult this is, take my favoured policy, a transferable marriage allowance. Imagine, for example, a young woman married to a soldier who goes off to fight in Afghanistan. He is killed in the service of his country. Does she lose the allowance? Presumably she does, so when we introduce the allowance we must alter the widow's pension to make up for this.
That is just one example of the many complexities we will have to address. Take another. It is almost certainly the case that the financial circumstances of the nation will require us to introduce any sort of allowance in stages. I would start by introducing an allowance for families with young children. I am influenced by watching my daughter struggle to balance career, school runs and finding good childminders. But what about others with competing claims? What about families with disabled children? There are many deserving categories.
It is clear the Conservatives favour reinforcing marriage. It should be clear that we do not intend to do so in a way that compounds the misfortune of the widow, the divorcee, the abandoned mother. It is obvious, for these reasons, and because of the dire financial state of the nation, that we will need to proceed cautiously. If that is the Tory promise, then for I one am happy with it.
SPEECH: David speaks in the debate on the Crime and Security Bill.
David makes a statement during a debate in the House of Commons regarding the Government’s retention of people’s DNA data on central databases:
“The Home Secretary knows that nobody disputes the value of DNA in solving cold cases as well as current crimes, but there is one figure that I would like him to confirm or deny. It relates to the holding of the DNA of innocent people—people who have not been found guilty and were released after arrest. Just over a year ago, the Prime Minister attributed the clearing up of 114 murders to such DNA. In other words, as a result of holding the DNA of previously innocent people, the police cleared up 114 murders. Is that correct, and if so, will the Home Secretary provide a list of them?”
To which the Home Secretary responded:
“The right hon. Gentleman says—this is the third time that I have heard it—that no one is disputing the advantage of DNA. I am stuck at this part of my speech because so many people have disputed it. We hear from a sedentary position that the numbers are coming down. The combination of the right hon. Gentleman's question and that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) means that I should provide some statistics to the House, because the statistics are interesting. I do not happen to have in my speech the one for which the right hon. Gentleman asked, but I have some others that he will find of interest.
I mentioned Paul Hutchinson. We can also take the case of Matthew Fagan. In 2006, he was sacked from a London company. In January 2007, he returned to the offices at the weekend to steal computers and was disturbed by a former colleague, Cathy Marlow, whom he brutally murdered. A significant factor in Matthew Fagan's conviction was that DNA retrieved from under Cathy Marlow's fingernails matched his profile, which was on the database because he had previously been arrested but not convicted for a disorder offence.
There was also the case of Abdirahman Ali Gudaal, arrested in July 2006 for robbery, but not convicted. His DNA was sampled and his record retained. In June this year, he was found guilty of the brutal rape and kidnap of a woman in Coventry, his DNA having matched samples found at the crime scene. Those are two examples of people who had been arrested but not convicted, and who subsequently committed brutal crimes, who would not have been brought to book without the DNA database.
In a recent debate, the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne), who speaks for the Liberal Democrats on this issue, described such cases, including the tragic case of Sally Anne Bowman, as "anecdotal". They are, of course, the personal tragedies that make this legislation necessary, and the response of the hon. Gentleman's party is woefully inadequate.
In developing this framework, we have sought to balance several important issues: first, human rights considerations. The House will be aware of the judgment by the European Court of Human Rights.”
David Davis: “I am afraid that the Home Secretary did not answer my question. Of course the individual cases that he mentions are incredibly important; indeed, I shall refer to some of them if I am lucky enough to catch your eye later, Mr. Speaker, and deal with them—[Interruption.] I shall do so despite the heckling from the Home Secretary's colleague. The simple fact is that the Home Secretary has not answered my question about the Prime Minister's assertion that 114 murders were solved as a result of previously innocent people's DNA being checked. Is that figure right or wrong? If it is right, may we have a list of those cases?”
The Home Secretary Alan Johnson: “I told the right hon. Gentleman that I would provide the House with statistics, and I have given two examples. Actually, even if there were only one example of a vicious murderer or rapist being brought to book in this way, I know that many Conservative Members would believe that this was worth doing—[Interruption.] Hon. Members are asking me to give names. I will provide the information that the right hon. Gentleman wants, but I have already given the House two very dramatic cases that would not have been solved under the policy being put forward by the Liberal Democrats, which we now know means that no one who is innocent and not convicted could remain on the DNA database.
The position of the Conservatives, as set out in the amendment that you quite rightly did not select, Mr. Speaker, is:""That this House declines to give a Second Reading to the Crime and Security Bill because the retention of the DNA of innocent citizens, which is the centrepiece of the Bill, is unacceptable.""
Yet their policy is to retain the DNA of innocent people. At least the Lib Dems, whose policy on this was overturned at their conference, say that we should not keep anyone's records. At least their policy is clear. The Conservatives' policy is actually contrary to their own amendment. They think that people who have been arrested for, but not convicted of, less serious charges should not remain on the DNA database, but that those who have been arrested for, but not convicted of, serious offences should remain on it. The most recent research shows that there is no difference between the two in regard to what is known as the hazard curve, and to the propensity of those people to be arrested again.”
Later in the debate, David has the Home Secretary give way again:
“And anything further I can take up on the train later, no doubt. The right hon. Gentleman is generous in giving way and I have two points for him. First, the policy he is mocking is, of course, the policy introduced by the Labour Government in Scotland at the time, so he should take that up with them. Secondly, I would not want him to mislead the House, inadvertently or otherwise, so will he return to his earlier point about the hazard curve, which he says is effectively flat? He says that there is no difference in respect of the likelihood of committing a crime in the future between someone who is innocent of any crime and someone who has committed a crime, yet the Home Office itself has published paper after paper after paper showing that that is not true.”
The Home Secretary Alan Johnson: “I accept that there is not a great wealth of research in this area, but it will grow in all parts of the world. The latest research we have is being independently peer-reviewed as we speak. It suggests that the Jill Dando Institute research on which we based our original proposals—which showed a difference in the hazard curve, or the propensity to be re-arrested, between those arrested but not convicted for serious offences and those arrested but not convicted for less serious offences—is wrong. In fact, the Jill Dando Institute itself said—unfortunately, nine months after it produced the research—that it was flawed. The latest research shows that there is absolutely no difference between the two, which is a very important factor. As to the Scottish scheme, I shall come on to that in a few moments.
Let me return to what I was saying about human rights considerations. This House is, of course, aware of the judgment handed down by the European Court of Human Rights on 8 December 2008, which ruled that although holding DNA records of those who had no conviction could well be proportionate in some cases, it was unlawful to hold those records indefinitely. This Bill responds to that judgment.
Secondly, we must consider what the most recent evidence in this developing field of research tells us. The research we published, along with our proposals in November 2009, shows that there is a link between previous arrests and future arrests. It also shows that, as time passes, that link diminishes so that after six years—not two, three or four, but six—the probability of re-arrest is no higher than for the rest of the population.
Thirdly, we must consider concerns about privacy. Many people find the idea of someone retaining their genetic material disturbing, which is why, although not required to do so by the European Court judgment, this Bill will require all DNA samples—namely, the actual genetic material—to be destroyed after six months. What is retained by the database is the unique 20-digit code that forms the DNA profile.
Fourthly, we must be mindful of the public's very reasonable expectation that the police will harness this enormous scientific advance to protect them from the most horrific crimes, and ensure justice for victims and their families. Under the framework proposed by the Bill, the DNA profiles of all those convicted of crimes, and all juveniles convicted of serious offences, will be held indefinitely, and the police will be given the powers to take DNA samples from people who were convicted of serious violent and sexual offences in the past, before DNA was routinely taken, and from those who have committed such offences and are returning from overseas. The DNA profiles of those who are arrested but not convicted will be retained for six years, in line with the findings of the best available research. I will talk more about that soon.
There is one important exception to the six-year rule. As national security investigations, including counter-terrorism cases, can go on for many years, setting a six-year time frame would potentially be damaging in these circumstances. We therefore propose to allow the retention of DNA profiles beyond the six-year point in these exceptional cases, which have been known to be live for as long as 25 years.
Under the framework set out in the Bill, the records of under-18s convicted of serious crimes will be held indefinitely. However, for those convicted of minor offences, if it is a first conviction, the record will be kept for five years, and only if it is a second conviction will that record be held indefinitely. We make this distinction because it is right that the criminal justice system distinguish between adults and children. For under-18s who are arrested for, but not convicted of, both serious crimes and minor offences, their records will be retained for three years. The records of 16 to 17-year-olds—those entering the peak offending years—will, however, be retained for six years where they have been arrested for, but not convicted of, a serious offence.”
New ARTICLE: It's time to let the public hold banks to account
This article appeared in 'The Independent' on Wednesday 30th December.
Since the onset of the financial crisis, there has been much talk about how it came about and how we can change our banking system so that it doesn't happen again.
We have had any number of different commissions and reports looking into the failures that have occurred. They were all insightful and useful, but they all focused on trying to fix the broken financial machine, rather than creating a reformed banking system which is fit for purpose.
The reason that banks have the privileges they do, up to and including being underwritten by a de facto taxpayer guarantee, is that they provide a vital service, to individual members of the public, businesses, and the economy as a whole.
Many have expressed concerns about whether banks and the City of London have provided the best possible service to the wider economy and the public in general. In the recent crisis Lord Turner described some of the banks' activities as "socially useless". Although he stirred up a controversy he had a point.
These concerns are not new. The crisis in which we find ourselves is the culmination of numerous regulatory and industry failings going back many years. Some were highlighted as far back as 2000 in Don Cruickshank's report Competition in UK Banking, and yet we've still got ourselves in a mess.
Many people and organisations have had their say on the crisis and its causes. But the general public has been conspicuous by its absence from the debate. Ordinary people have been hit hardest by the recession and have been asked to bail out the crippled banks with their taxes, but they haven't been asked how they think banks can change for the better.
This commission will give them a voice in the debate about how the banking system should be reformed. That way, not only can we avoid a repeat of the financial crisis, but banks will be encouraged to operate in the wider interests of society.
We will be seeking evidence from a cross-section of interest groups including the banking industry, academics, the Bank of England, the Financial Services Authority, trades unions and other consumer groups.
The commission will be looking to answer questions concerning the social function of banking, the impact on the public of the financial crisis, how to align the interests of consumers, banks, investors and other stakeholders, and how to ensure greater competition in retail banking, among others.
It is past time that we had a proper analysis of banking from the perspective of the people they serve, the savers, borrowers and businesses that make the economy work. I hope this commission will deliver that.
David's ARTICLE in the Sunday Times: Think tank: Teachers are enfeebled by pupils’ slurs
This article appeared in 'The Sunday Times' on Sunday December 20th.
Some years ago a supply teacher in an inner-city school in my constituency was accused by a young girl in his class of putting his hand on her breast.
The story looked like a concoction from the start. The girl was a known troublemaker; her only “witness” was one of her pals; the offence was supposed to have been carried out in a crowded classroom, yet no one else saw it. Indeed, another adult who was in the room said that it had not happened.
Nevertheless, the man was suspended without pay, the council’s children’s services department became involved and the case was passed to the police. It was a year before it came to court and, in that time, he was unpaid and unable to work.
I spoke to the case officer in the children’s services department. The conversation was shocking. She clearly considered that my constituent was guilty and was not interested in the contrary evidence.
In court, the jury took only 20 minutes to decide. The judge dismissed the evidence in pretty scathing terms.
But my constituent’s life was destroyed. He could not bear to return to teaching, even if he could get a job in this suspicion-prone age. Even if you are exonerated, your record often still carries the unwarranted stain on your character. He was turned down as a special constable because of the shadow of the case, even though he had been completely cleared. The judge in the case summed it up pretty accurately: “Teachers live in an excessively power-to-the-pupil environment. The government and members of the public need to be made aware of this growing problem in schools, where one day there will be no more teachers because the word of every child is valued over and beyond that of everyone else.”
I was angry but there was nothing I could do. The cowardice and incompetence of the relevant authorities had done permanent harm, but I could not reverse it. I wrote it off to experience.
Then, recently, another man, a teaching assistant, was put through a similar ordeal. A former Commonwealth champion kickboxer was accused of assaulting an unruly pupil. He was exonerated after eight months of hell, during which he was even banned from seeing his own children for two weeks.
Curiously, it was the same local council department, the same local Crown Prosecution Service and the same police force that had brought the case against my constituent.
In truth this is a nationwide problem. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers recently surveyed its members and found that almost 30% had been the victims of false allegations.
In the past 20 years the balance of power in our classrooms has moved away from the teachers to the children. The consequences for the teachers have often been agonising, even tragic, but the real victims have been the children.
Nobody can learn in an unruly class. When teachers are paralysed by disruptive children, they fail to impart any knowledge to the obedient youngsters. Worse, in some ways, they effectively teach all the children that breaking the rules works.
So we need to change the balance of power in the classroom and return decent standards to many of our schools. That may mean a change in the law. So be it.
We need to return to believing the responsible adult before believing the irresponsible child. We need to punish children who make false allegations and return honest standards to our schools.
So far, so bad. Then, this summer, we had the uproar over the new Independent Safeguarding Authority proposing to check every visitor to a school against the criminal records database. Last week the government conceded that 2m people who visit schools less than once a week will be exempted from the vetting and barring procedure. But that still leaves 9m subject to it.
Surely this is a good thing? After the Soham murders, do we not want to avoid any risk at all of exposing children to the likes of Ian Huntley? True, but the method we have chosen surreptitiously destroys the lives of many who are victims of slanders. The legislation requires the authority to bar anyone from dealing with children or vulnerable adults unless there is “no known reason why an individual should not work with these client groups”.
The decision to ban someone is entirely confined to the authority. Appeals and objections are dealt with inside the organisation. This cannot be right. When it is revised, as Ed Balls, the schools secretary, has promised it will be, a proper judicial check should be inserted so that victims of vicious calumny can rescue their reputations by appeal to a judicial tribunal at a standard of proof beyond reasonable suspicion. We must remove this culture of suspicion from our schools and institutions. British justice demands no less.
David's ARTICLE on Climate Change Policy in the Independent
David Davis: Why this ferocious desire to impose hair-shirt policies?
As the dignitaries gather for the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, dark clouds are gathering over environmental policies. Copenhagen itself has been presaged by troubling signals that it will be harder than usual to get agreement. These will probably be resolved, but it is debatable whether that will make any real difference. In Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the international community promised cuts by 2000. In Kyoto in 1997, they promised even greater cuts by 2010. Neither happened.
The row about whether global warming exists gets even more virulent. The case is not helped by the fact that the planet appears to have been cooling, not warming, in the last decade. Last week, the row was fuelled after a hacker revealed emails between the world's leading climate scientists that seemed to show them conspiring to rig the figures to support their theories. So it is unsurprising that more than half the public no longer believe in global warming.
Today, the economic climate makes people question whether we can afford the expense of these policies. The UK's environmental policy has a long-term price tag of about £55bn, before taking into account the impact on economic growth.
The fixation of the green movement with setting ever tougher targets is a policy destined to collapse. The ferocious determination to impose hair-shirt policies on the public – taxes on holiday flights, or covering our beautiful countryside with wind turbines that look like props from War of the Worlds – would cause a reaction in any democratic country.
This adverse reaction will be reinforced if, as predicted, we suffer power shortages in the next decade. Lights going out around Britain could be an electoral off-switch for environmental policy. This will happen at the same time as fuel bills rise by 30 per cent.
Paradoxically, the Government's strategy is going to have a number of deleterious consequences for the environment. Biomass fuels will increase atmospheric pollution in the countryside, with harmful effects on health. The Government's own estimate of this policy-led pollution says it could cost as many as 1,750,000 man-years in lost or shortened lives.
Similarly, the wind strategy is encouraging the building of large clusters of enormous wind turbines in the countryside that will scar the landscape, and whose noise levels could ruin people's lives. The planning blight alone will afflict hundreds of thousands of families and damage the value of many homes – and all with enormous taxpayer subsidies.
We often worry, properly, about the potential effects of global warming on the poorer parts of the world. We should also worry that cutting the world's growth will condemn millions of people to continuing poverty in the decades to come.
So what do we do about it? Much environmental policy is beneficial to the public. It is intelligent to conserve resources, to insulate homes, to encourage lean-burn engines and efficient power generation. Along with the sensible use of renewables, this is worthwhile in its own right. It will have the important side-effect of reducing our dependence on energy sources in unstable parts of the globe.
There is also a pressing need to protect elements of the natural world under immediate threat.
So is there a middle way in environmental policy? Can we devise a mixed policy that has realistic prospects of success in cutting carbon dioxide production at less-than-crippling cost, and also acts to accommodate the effects that we cannot prevent? Is there a smart green alternative?
Just to pick one example, micro-generation is a technology which is often overlooked. Micro-combined heat and power systems just about to enter the market would provide the same heat as a regular boiler, produce most of the electricity needs of the property, and cut carbon emissions by anything up to 50 per cent.
This sort of local power generation has a number of benefits. It avoids the waste associated with transmitting from central power stations; it would keep running through any blackouts; and it could make a major contribution to domestic reductions in carbon emissions in the long term.
Like it or not, a major increase in nuclear power must also be central to any sustainable future energy policy. It will be costly in the short term, but it will be a reliable ongoing source of power, and is a true zero-carbon option with enormous benefits for climate change.
But the single biggest change in mindset that is necessary is to give more prominence to a policy of adaptation. This should range from basic lo-tech ideas such as reversing the policy of abandoning sea defences, to very hi-tech developments, such as maximising cloud reflectivity – the technology for which is still some way off, but should not be dismissed.
Many of the people signed up to the green movement instinctively believe in statist, regulatory, dirigiste regimes. They forget these approaches have failed many times before – or perhaps believe the sheer importance of the cause will carry them through policy weaknesses. But the importance of the issue should make us doubly careful to get the policies right.
To date, too many discussions on this matter have degenerated into infantile mud-slinging and virulent name-calling. It is simply unacceptable for one side to describe the other as deniers, with its deliberate holocaust connotations, and the other side to essentially call their opponents liars. This issue is too important for the argument to be reduced to the level of an adolescent political spat, and it is time we engaged in this debate on a properly adult level.
David's Afghanistan article in the Independent
·David Davis: Crunch time for a botched mission
It is not uncommon in British history for the early stages of counter-insurgency campaigns to be littered with mistakes and false starts. Few, however, can have been pursued with the uncomprehending incompetence of this Government in its actions in Afghanistan.
We had barely established our base of operations when we effectively abandoned the strategy for winning these conflicts, a strategy that had been hammered out over the decades, from the successful conclusion of the "Malayan Emergency" on.
The original "ink-blot" strategy, based on the Malayan success, envisaged commanding and dominating areas of land and population. Within those areas the rule of law would apply, and the ordinary citizens would be able to go about their business, farming, trading, and supporting their families unmolested by the insurgents. Like ink-blots, these areas would expand until they joined up.
The concept depended on guaranteeing security and normality to the population inside the inkblots, so that they would be better off than those in the insurgent areas. Instead, within months, and under pressure from President Karzai, this was abandoned in favour of defending a number of far-flung outposts, in locations where our authority did not extend more than a rifle-shot beyond the walls of the compound. This strategy quickly became known as the "tethered goat" strategy, since it turned our soldiers into immobile targets.
Now the generals are talking about retreating from the most far-flung of the outposts, to husband their limited resources in an attempt to dominate the key population centres of Helmand. Four years in, it is simply a return to the strategy that we should have followed from the beginning.
It is hardly surprising that popular support for the war is slipping away in Britain. When we add in the corruption of the Karzai government, the disgraceful travesty of an election, and the betrayal and killing of our soldiers by an Afghan "ally", it would be astonishing if we witnessed anything but a collapse in support.
It will not be helped by both Brown's and Obama's reluctance to put in enough troops, which has had the effect of increasing the risk to those that were in theatre. This is compounded by Gordon Brown's decision to pre-announce a decision to leave Afghanistan, without having any serious plan as to how to do so.
To win back support Gordon Brown must stop the patronisingly simplistic justifications for what we are doing.
He attempts to portray this war as directly protecting the streets of Britain. Well, maybe. There are not many Taliban in our cities. What he is clumsily alluding to is the idea of denying space to al-Qa'ida. This is a fine aim, but to make it effective we would also have to deny them space in every lawless Muslim state in the world – Somalia, Yemen and any number of others. That is not realistically in prospect.
What we have to recognise is that this war has many aims. They include creating a stable state, preferably a democracy, but not necessarily one that looks much like ours. They include curbing the poppy trade, partly to cut drugs on our streets, but mostly to shut off funds for terrorism, crime, and insurrection. Perhaps most important is the prevention of the complete destabilisation of Pakistan, the world's most fragile nuclear power.
Finally, since we have become involved, a further purpose has come to the fore. If we fail in Afghanistan, the whole credibility of the Western Alliance will collapse. We have to do everything possible to win. Unfortunately, having wasted so much time, we only have about a year left to turn this battle around.
Next November there will be the US congressional mid-term elections. If we have not seen signs of progress by then, the pressure on President Obama to reduce the commitment, or even pull out altogether, will become enormous. He is already haunted by the history of LBJ's presidency, whose New Society domestic agenda was overshadowed by the ignominious end to the Vietnam War. If he believes he is not winning, it will look like the smart option to pull out well before his own election campaign.
Which gives us just one year to make it work. Fortunately, General McChrystal understands that, and we should start by strongly supporting his call for 40,000 more troops, and sooner rather than later.
For our own part, we should stop dribbling in resources piecemeal. That is a formula for maximising casualties. We should decide what is the maximum number of troops on the ground we can sustain for the next few years, and commit to it without hesitation.
This military "surge" needs to be backed up with a much simpler civil strategy. Schools and hospitals are important, but Afghan needs are even more basic than this. They need to be able to work, farm, and trade in safety. They need to be able to feed their families and heat their homes. We are failing even at this level.
The urgency of this situation cannot be overstated. We must grip it now.
There is one further consideration that is understandably worrying the Shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague. Afghanistan will be an issue in the General Election, as Iraq was in the last one. Indeed, with its daily death toll, it may be even more salient than Iraq was. I would be unsurprised if by May the Liberals had moved their position to one favouring rapid withdrawal.
This will put an incoming Conservative government in a hideous position. Virtually all the decisions that affect the outcome by November will have been made by May, entirely outside the Conservatives' control. If we are not witnessing a change in our military fortunes by November, decisions in Washington may leave the new government with no choice but British withdrawal from the Helmand mission as almost its first act on the international stage.
In all the grim inheritance that he leaves us, this will be Gordon Brown's bitterest legacy of all.
David's article in the Daily Mail
Sinister threat to open justice
Today, Remembrance Day, we commemorate the sacrifice of the lives of millions of Commonwealth citizens - a sacrifice made to defend our system of liberty and justice.
It is a tragic irony that on this of all days, the House of Lords is debating a government proposal which undermines those noble principles through the creation of secret inquests.
For centuries, the whole point of an inquest has been independence and openness. It is there to tell the bereaved and the public exactly why someone died. And this is never more important than when the State is implicated in the death. The very openness of the process gives power to the people and provides a check on the State.
Yet the Government has repeatedly tried to subvert this time-honoured principle through the creation of secret inquests, heedless to the damage such a measure would do to the very standing of democracy.
It all started when Des Browne, the then Labour Defence Secretary, went to court to try to gag comments made by coroners at inquests held into the deaths of British service personnel. That was after a string of cases in which the verdicts savagely criticised the government when soldiers had died because of inadequate or missing equipment.
It also followed a dreadful 'friendly fire' incident when an American aircraft shot Lance Corporal Matty Hull, and the American government tried to withhold the evidence.
Despite the surrounding furore, the Government has since made repeated attempts to give itself the ability to have completely secret inquests, claiming, for example, that it was an issue of 'national security'. Many suspected that this was about avoiding political embarrassment rather than protecting the nation.
Yet still Labour ministers persisted - and yesterday a clause was finally voted through in the Coroners and Justice Bill which will allow for open inquests to be replaced with 'secret inquiries', to be held at the behest of the Government in certain sensitive cases.
The minister will set the terms of reference, the minister will choose the judge, the minister or the judge can restrict attendance at the hearings, a minister or the judge can restrict the disclosure or publication of evidence or documents, and the minister can censor the inquiry conclusions on the grounds that it is in their own interpretation of the public interest to do so.
In other words, secret inquiries will not be independent or provide public scrutiny, and they will not give the next of kin proper involvement, understanding or closure.
Even if an open inquest is held after the inquiry is over, the jury is not allowed to make a contradictory finding to the inquiry even if that is where the facts take it.
So the secret inquiry will not only deny the facts to the families and public, it will also cripple the inquest and prevent it doing its proper job. This is simply intolerable and a gross insult to the relatives of the fallen.
Moreover, if these new powers were put into practice the implications would be incredibly widespread. Secret inquiries could, in theory, be used in the interests of national security; in the interests of a relationship with another country; in the interests of preventing or detecting a crime; in order to protect the safety of a witness or another person; and in order to prevent harm to the public interest. In practice, of course, they will be triggered whenever the government faces embarrassment.
For who would take Labour at their word when they say they will not use the new inquiries often?
This would not be the first time the Government has granted itself new powers on the promise of exercising them in exceptional cases, only to use them more widely.
In the name of political expedience, Labour wants to fracture one of the very foundations of our justice system. And we can be sure that, like every other piece of excessive ' security' legislation, it will be misused.
David's article on Europe in the Daily Mail
A referendum Mr Cameron COULD give the people
This week Britain reaches a point of historic decision. Now the Czech court has removed the last block to ratifying the Lisbon Treaty, we have to decide how we are to deal with the great European power-grab that this treaty constitutes.
David Cameron has an unenviable task. Europe has been a toxic topic for the Tory party for two decades now. It has destroyed two of its leaders, and crippled its ability to do anything else for much of that time. Mr Cameron could be forgiven for wanting to avoid the subject altogether.
But that is not possible. The British people have been promised a referendum by all the major parties. The treaty itself is undoubtedly a massive constitutional transformation. It has been ratified by an unelected prime minister without a mandate.
All these are arguments for a referendum, almost irrefutable ones. But on what? Any incoming government will be faced with the ultimate fait accompli, a binding treaty which it cannot revoke.
So a referendum on the treaty would be pointless. Nevertheless William Hague has said: 'We will not let it rest there.' So what can we do?
What we should do is, in my view, clear. We should have a referendum, not on the treaty, but on the negotiating mandate that the British Government takes to the European Union.
This has many virtues. It allows the British people to express their view on the future of their nation. Most of all, it gives the Government a formidable negotiating weapon.
Referendums terrify the European Commission and the political elites who run Europe. They are clear statements of the popular will. They force issues to be stated in clear and unambiguous terms. They are impossible to ignore.
That is why the European reaction to referendums is to make concessions. Look at the history. After Ireland's first rejection of the Lisbon Treaty, the European Council conceded legally binding protocols pledging to keep the treaty out of taxation policy, family and social issues (such as the right to life, abortion and euthanasia), and Ireland's traditional military neutrality.
Denmark has obtained similar opt-outs after a referendum, and the defeat in the French and Dutch referendums led to the rewrite of the original European Constitution.
So referendums are incredibly powerful weapons. What is more, they are necessary if a single nation is going to achieve any material change.
The Europeans are past masters at the permanent negotiation that makes up the federal project. They know all the tricks of isolation, pressure, delay, coalition, vague language, and institutional and judicial expansion.
They are entirely capable of repackaging rejected ideas over and over until they get them accepted. Lisbon is a good example of this. Indeed they are capable of retabling a rejected proposal five or ten years later, after the relevant national governments have changed.
So if we are to be able to manage our relationship with the European Union, let alone change it, we need to have a powerful weapon like a referendum.
But what should be the question in such a referendum? It should be a question that would result in a solid majority, because that would give the maximum reinforcement to our negotiating position.
The question should contain four or five specific strategic aims which clearly summarise our objectives.
The sort of things we might include are: recovering control over our criminal justice, asylum and immigration policies; a robust opt-out of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights; serious exemptions to the seemingly endless flood of European regulations which cost the UK economy billions of pounds each year; a recovery of our rights to negotiate on trade; exemption from European interference into trade in services and foreign direct investment rules; and an exemption from any restrictions on our foreign policy.
The referendum should be the first piece of legislation in the new parliament, and should be held within three months of the election.
Some fear this would become an 'in or out' referendum, a decision on whether to continue our membership of the European Union. It would be nothing of the sort. Killing this tired old canard is one of the reasons the referendum question has to be absolutely clear in language and intent.
If our opponents keep trying to make this argument, it will give us an opportunity to highlight the fallacy that there are only two options in Europe: either capitulate to the Franco- German federalist model, or leave. It is clear that this notion of such a vote being an 'in or out' referendum is both craven and wrong.
After winning such a referendum, the position of our negotiating team in Brussels would be the strongest in British history. In effect they would be the advocates of the popular will ranked against the defenders of the current establishment.
That will not be comfortable for the European Commission at all.
Of course it is possible that we will not achieve every change we want.
If that is the outcome, we should give the British people the right to accept or reject it in a further referendum. This is, in effect, using the European Commission's own trick against it. They are notorious, when a referendum delivers what they think is the 'wrong' answer, for asking the question again until they get the 'right' answer.
This 'double referendum' strategy may seem a very tough way of playing these negotiations. It is. But it is hard to see any less robust strategy delivering any significant change.
We should not forget that what we are arguing about is the democratic right of the British people to decide large and important sections of our national policy. It is time that we achieved a stable, reasonable, and civilised settlement of these matters, based firmly on the popular will.
David's article on Control Orders in the Mail on Sunday
As Jack Straw spoke, this suspected terrorist stood just feet away…proof of the complete folly of Labour’s ‘control orders
Control orders, the system of secret courts and house arrests introduced by the Government in 2005, are there to protect us from dangerous terrorists.
That is what the Government tells us. Yet this supposedly vital system is undergoing a legal and practical collapse.
In the past few weeks the Home Office has decided to release two of these ‘dangerous terrorists’ on to the streets of Britain, rather than explain in court the case against them.
This is in addition to the four others whose orders have been revoked. It is also in addition to the seven more resourceful, and presumably therefore more dangerous, suspects who simply escaped.
So, clearly, this dark corner of our justice system is not providing much protection, with 18 suspects under control and about 11 walking the streets.
But we do not receive much protection even from those who are supposedly ‘under control’.
On June 6 this year, Jack Straw – Justice Secretary, Foreign Secretary during the Iraq War and Home Secretary before that, and presumably therefore a valuable terrorist target – was addressing a meeting in London staged by Liberty, the human rights group.
Only a matter of feet away from him, well within range of a suicide bomb or pistol, was Mahmoud Abu Rideh, a stateless Palestinian terrorist suspect who had spent much of the previous few years in Belmarsh prison, Broadmoor prison or wearing an electronic tag, and who was still under a control order.
Mr Abu Rideh heckled another speaker at the meeting, the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg. The organisers were horrified – there was not a policeman or security minder in sight.
Mr Abu Rideh was also seen unaccompanied at an anti-war demonstration in Trafalgar Square. He has since left the country. But if we cannot protect senior political figures, what chance the ordinary man in the street?
The trouble is the control-order regime is hopelessly ineffective against real terrorists, but viciously cruel to any innocent entangled in its web.
Sometimes the treatment seems silly or even vindictive, such as the apparently unnecessary forced separations of families, or the pointless confiscation of a Nintendo Wii, a PlayStation and a PSP from the children of one suspect.
This is the shadowy world that the House of Lords described as the ‘stuff of nightmares’.
Control orders are the product of secret courts, in which the alleged terrorist does not know the evidence, or even the detailed accusation, against him.
This means he is unable properly to deny the charge, or even explain his actions and put up evidence in his own defence. None of the normal principles of British justice applies.
Our system of justice is not a luxury. It is there to prevent mistakes and people being wrongly convicted. Without the proper judicial processes, terrible errors can be, and are, made.
Under the secret control-order system, we only catch these mistakes by accident. On one occasion, MI5 put up opposing evidence in two separate but related cases.
Fortunately, a security-cleared lawyer working on both cases spotted the impossibility of MI5’s evidence and the second case was thrown out.
On another occasion, a UN committee designated a British resident as an Al Qaeda suspect.
Without knowing the evidence against him, he was put under crippling financial restraints that left him unable even to buy food or clothing, until eventually even the Foreign Office decided that the UN’s evidence did not stand up.
But these were lucky exceptions in a system that has led to some of the special security-cleared lawyers resigning in disgust.
The outcome of all this is that even the Government is beginning to recognise what an utter failure the control-order system is. Like so many of Labour’s ill-conceived attempts to twist our judicial system to deal with terrorism, it is proving a disastrous and counter-productive failure.
It creates potential injustices on the one hand while failing to cut terrorism on the other.
It allows our enemies abroad to portray us as hypocrites, and very probably helps the extremist recruiters in our inner cities.
At the end of all this, it seems highly likely that the Government will drop the cases against most, if not all, of the last 18 control-order subjects.
So it will release on to our streets people it describes as ‘dangerous’ and posing ‘serious threats to our national security’.
The terrible truth is that in some cases the Government is probably right. So now we have the worst of all worlds – injustice that has done nothing to mitigate the future threat.
So what is the way out of this tangled mess? How can we enhance our judicial system so that it delivers real terrorists to justice, protects the innocent and, most of all, protects the public?
As luck would have it, we have just had a perfect demonstration of the way out of our dilemma.
In the Heathrow ‘liquid bomb’ case, some of the plotters nearly got off scot-free because, pretty much alone in the Western world, British courts are not allowed to hear intercept evidence from British intelligence agencies.
Our old-fashioned laws render our most powerful evidence useless. Fortunately, in the retrial, critical email communications between the plotters were revealed in court, permissible because they came from a foreign source – the records at Yahoo in America.
So by using foreign-based intercept evidence, we were able to prosecute and convict two dangerous terrorists.
Two years ago, under sustained pressure from the Opposition, and I suspect under advice from the Crown Prosecution Service and Attorney General, the Government set up the Chilcot review into allowing British courts to use intercept evidence.
It concluded that it was a good idea, but recommended that the intercepting agencies should control whether the evidence may be used in court.
Since then the Home Office has been trying to devise a practical way of implementing this. Its hierarchy and GCHQ have always been nervous of the proposal.
Someone who is both expert in the area and who has been exposed to the process told me last week: ‘They got a bunch of lawyers and told them to think up as many problems as they could.’
Whatever the reality, progress has been disastrously slow, and in recent weeks there has been a lot of briefing that it is all too difficult.
Frankly, that is not good enough. When the various agencies briefed me (as Shadow Home Secretary) on this issue, their arguments were facile.
They seemed to assume that terrorists did not watch television, look at the internet or follow the trials of their fellow travellers abroad – that somehow British use of intercept in court would put in the public domain secrets that are not regularly exposed in American, Australian, Canadian and European courts.
They tried to argue that somehow our intercept technique was more sophisticated than that of our allies. Given that the American agencies are bigger and better resourced, that is unlikely to be true.
Those were the overt arguments. The covert ones were even less persuasive. The truth is that our counter-terrorism strategy is at a point of crisis.
Control orders are about to collapse. If we do not give ourselves the weapons to prosecute terrorists using some, but not all, intelligence-based material, we are going to be putting some dangerous people on our streets – more than we have done already.
To avoid that, we must stop bleating about how difficult it all is and create a mechanism to allow intercept material to be used in court.
As a past Australian Director of Public Prosecutions put it succinctly: ‘In dealing with terrorism, if you don’t use intercept, you aren’t being serious.’
David's article in the Sunday Times
There’s just one cut that can save us: Only a reduction in tax on business will revive the economy
In the debate on our economic strategy, one thing should be more obvious than it appears to be. The sheer, uniquely awful scale of the United Kingdom’s problem means that no single solution offers any hope of success.
Public expenditure control alone will not do it. The public sector deficit amounts to about a quarter of total public spending. Not even the most draconian cost-cutter pretends they can achieve that. One of the most successful governments at cutting public expenditure, in Canada, managed less than half that in four years, and it had advantages we do not enjoy.
What do we need to do beyond cost control? The majority of the fiscal deficit, some £90 billion a year, is caused by the crash in the growth rate of the economy. Falling tax yields and soaring welfare costs are the inevitable consequence of a slump in the economy, and this is doubly true in Britain, both because of our tax and welfare structure, and because of the sheer magnitude of our crash.
What this implies is that one of the principal policies for fiscal recovery must be a strategy for growth in the private sector. In order of magnitude terms, every increase in the growth rate of 1% improves the recurrent fiscal balance by between £10 billion and £20 billion.
This growth strategy cannot simply be an exercise in Keynesian demand management. This is what the government is relying on and, as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development showed, it is so ineffective that the UK is at the bottom of the growth league table. Neither will short-term demand management correct the worst decline in business investment since records began. What is necessary is a strategy that attracts investment, encourages innovation, enhances productivity, and thereby improves both competitiveness and job creation.
Such an effective growth strategy would inevitably depend on cuts in taxes and regulations, both apparently contrary to the spirit of the age. Tax increases, rather than cuts, are in fashion. Some tax increases are going to be necessary, but some are harmful and counterproductive. By the economic equivalent of Murphy’s law, the politically easy tax increases are the most harmful, and the most economically advantageous tax cuts are the most politically unpopular.
Take the 50p top rate of income tax on people earning more than £150,000. This is the most politically motivated and economically illiterate tax of modern times. The least deleterious consequence will be a sharp rise in expenditure on accountants hired to find avoidance methods. Expect to see a sharp increase in income being arbitraged into tax-free pensions and capital gains.
Worse, we will see people leaving the country to friendlier tax regimes, of which there are now many. So instead of increasing the tax take from a particularly talented and well-paid individual, we will lose the entire tax revenue — and with it all the benefits of having that talent in the UK. Once our most productive talent has fled these shores, they will not come back for a mere return to 40p. Moving house, moving schools, moving office is too irksome to do twice. The 50p top rate is only one of the economic barnacles slowing down our ship of state. Corporation tax is another.
Over the years the level of corporate tax that maximises tax yields has declined, as countries adjusted their own rates downwards. For the vast majority of those countries, corporate tax revenues increased after a short lag.
The gain is not confined to corporate tax revenues. One study of a prospective halving of Britain’s rate showed significant increases in employment, wages, savings, GDP and fixed investment over a decade. Increases in corporation tax, income tax and Vat receipts would lead to a nearly £30 billion improvement by 2021.
These gains arise from increasing entrepreneurship, greater inward investment and reduced tax avoidance. The benefits are not just about balancing the books; they are about creating more opportunity and more wealth.
We should be planning a future reduction in corporate taxes as an explicit growth strategy. Investment planning is by definition forward-looking, so if a British government announced a significant reduction two years in advance, we would be likely to avoid the short-term shortfall, and benefit from immediate investment growth. The more clearly we committed to this as a central economic strategy, the more beneficial the impact would be.
Finally we should cancel the pending increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions, and start to cut it. This contribution is an explicit tax on jobs. Once we have attracted business to the UK and encouraged its growth, we should encourage it to employ people. “British jobs for British workers” was just irresponsible rhetoric; but “real jobs for British residents” is an achievable reality.
David's University article in the Mail on Sunday
Why University fails the poor
You would have to have had a heart of stone these past few days not to have shared the joy in the eyes and voices of all those young men and women celebrating their GCSE and A-level results. It was a proper reaction to the success engendered by their years of hard work and their optimism about a bright future.
Yet behind the celebration of the glittering prizes, there is a darker story to be told. This story is that of an education system designed to create opportunity for all which, in fact, reinforces the class divide in our society.
The symptoms are all there for anyone with eyes to see. One in six of our young people is not in school, college or work. Many of them are from poor homes, often with an unemployed head of the household.
Schools in poorer areas are dropping tough subjects - physics, mathematics, history and geography - in favour of the 'softer' subjects such as information and communication technology (ICT) or media studies, in the hope that weaker candidates will do better in these easier topics and prop up the school's position in the league tables.
If this were not bad enough, there are signs that this serial failure by our education system to help kids from poor backgrounds extends into the university sector.
About 20 years ago, in a fit of misguided egalitarianism, the then Conservative government abolished distinctions in higher education between universities and polytechnics. Of course, no stroke of the pen could abolish distinctions in performance between them. Indeed, there is some evidence that this action turned some first-class polytechnics into second-class universities.
This distinction in quality of education still exists but it is now hidden by the names. Indeed, it is likely that Labour's massive expansion in higher education has made the poor performance of the weakest colleges worse, not better.
Does it matter? Surely a degree is a degree, and any degree is a stepping stone to a professional career. Well, that is certainly true up to a point. Too many professions today brag about being 'graduate only', as if excluding the bright youngsters who could not afford university was some sort of virtue. But there is a harder truth hidden here. Going to university is no longer free.
When I went to university at Warwick, most of my contemporaries had grants, which were supplemented by parental contributions. And, in an era of full employment, there was part-time work and holiday work to be had. Many of my friends got their first experience of real-life earning money on building sites or delivering Christmas mail or working behind a bar. We generally had no debt when we qualified. None of this is true today.
One report out last week predicted that students would leave university with an average debt of £24,000. Poorer students, without wealthy parents to subsidise them, will probably have even bigger loans. Even that underestimates the real cost of university. If you add in all the costs, from tuition fees to the foregone income students would have had in a job for those three years, the real cost of a degree is £45,000.
For most students, it is still a good deal. They earn enough in their career to make up for the costs and lost income. But this is not true for all graduates. For graduates of Oxford, Cambridge, the London School of Economics and other top universities, their starting salaries will average between £23,000 and £27,000. Their take-home pay will be up to £9,000 more than that of the average 21-year-old.
This means that for those graduates, typically middle class and mostly the products of independent schools and grammars, their investment in university could deliver them a benefit of up to £100,000 in their career.
At the other end of the scale, you will find universities whose typical graduate earns about £17,500. After tax, this is less than £2,000 more than the average 21-year-old earns.
On any normal financial return, that never pays off the costs and earnings lost as a result of three years at college.
My university degree guaranteed a job that would pay well enough to justify the three-year investment. No such guarantee applies today.
This summer, I surveyed many universities from the top to the bottom of the academic scale. About 20 were willing to give me information including graduate salaries for 2007-08. Of those, about five showed financial returns that were marginal at best and two showed graduate earnings as low as £17,500 a year.
Part of the reason for these poor average salaries was graduates going into 'non-graduate' jobs. Last year, the national average taking this path was more than 30 per cent. For poorer-performing universities, more than four out of ten graduates end up doing jobs they are overqualified for.
All this is without counting those graduates who do not get jobs at all. One in ten graduates of the low-performing universities simply joined the ranks of the unemployed. It also ignores those students who start their degree course, incurring many of the costs, but never finish.
Again, the poorer-quality universities do much worse here. One in 11 students do not complete their course at the weaker universities, against only one in 50 at Oxford, and less than one in 100 at Cambridge.
In general, those universities that generate the lowest salaries also generate the highest unemployment figures and the highest drop-out rates. For students attending these institutions, the risks are high, the rewards are low and the costs are no less.
For most young people going to university this year, the experience will be life-enhancing in every way. It will broaden minds, elevate aspirations and open up opportunities that they never had before.
But for that significant minority it will be a financial cul-de-sac and they'll spend their 20s enmeshed in debt, unable to get on the housing ladder and struggling to create a career.
We owe these young people a rather more honest perspective of their opportunities than we are giving them now. The Government should publish immediately a league table showing every university's graduate salaries, employment and drop-out rates, and proportions of graduates in non-graduate jobs. Then, at least, we can be sure that, in the struggle for scarce places that will take place during the next few weeks, school-leavers will not be disappointed because they make their most important career choice on what may turn out to be a false prospectus.
David's Afghanistan article in the Evening Standard
Afghanistan: The wasted years and lives
When British troops went into Afghanistan in 2006 it was seen by many as the “good” war, in contrast to Iraq. I was not so sure. It was not just that we did not appear to know how to achieve victory. We did not even know how we would recognise a victory.
What would winning look like? Underpinning Afghan democracy? Stabilising the Karzai regime? Providing education and healthcare to the Afghan population, both male and female? Delivering law and order? Eradicating corruption? Creating a working economy? Crushing the drug trade? Protecting Pakistan from instability? Or simply defeating the Taliban and creating a stable state?
The truth is on the day of its second “democratic” election, after yeans of pain and more than 200 British deaths, we are no closer to any of these objectives. Throughout that period, our resources have been inadequate, our strategy has been flawed, and many young lives have been spent to little or no effect.
From the point of view of the Afghan, the perception of the Allied forces has gone from the liberators of 2002, to an army of occupation in 2009. Although comparisons with Vietnam are trite and generally wrong, there is one grim similarity. We are seen by the population as propping up a corrupt and largely useless government, one that cannot even deliver basic security and justice to its own people — let alone the more ambitious aspects of government such as education and healthcare. The only beneficiaries of the past several years appear to be the 20 or so corrupt families who have become multimillionaires under Karzai — families that are all associated with him or his warlords.
Corruption is so rife that in the southern provinces the ordinary population are as likely to go to the Taliban for justice as to the government. In Kabul, if your cousin is kidnapped, the last people you go to are the police.
We have only ourselves to blame. The current tension over how long the war will last — from 40 years according to one general, to five from another, to some optimistic lesser time from the Secretary of State, demonstrate how schizophrenic our policy-makers are. This schizophrenia afflicts every aspect of our strategy, be it political, economic, social, judicial or diplomatic.
Take our policy on the poppy trade. Before we went into Afghanistan, Tony Blair accepted responsibility from the G6 for eradicating the Afghan opium trade. We did so little that the American government was publicly fulminating about our incompetence. Then when our forces went into Helmand, the epicentre of opium production, we decided that poppy eradication was contrary to our “hearts and minds” policy.
After a couple more years it dawned on the Government that the poppy was the primary funder of Taliban operations, so we had better eradicate it after all. Then it arose that it was illegal for ISAF (Nato) troops to police “civilian” drugs operations. We had the farce of British police counter-narcotics officers sent to Helmand who were not allowed to leave the base in Lash Kar Gar. Today there is still no co-ordinated eradication and replacement policy.
We will eventually get it right but we have wasted six years and many lives because of our shallow initial understanding of the problem. Similar indecision has affected our military strategy, with the infamous “Platoon House strategy” forced on us by the Karzai government, making Taliban targets of our brave young soldiers and crippling our ability to control the ground.
The question remains, what now? What is necessary is a level of effort and commitment as intense as that which turned around the Iraq conflict, but on a broader and more complex front, and sustained over a longer period.
Afghanistan is a bigger and more difficult country than Iraq. It has complex tribal, linguistic and political divisions. It is grindingly poor. It has no tradition of strong central government. Indeed, it has a 30-year tradition of civil war. Its most problematic areas have a massive economic dependency on the poppy.
But it also has a more direct impact on British and wider Western interests. While there is no direct link between the Taliban and terrorism on the streets of Britain, it could collapse back into a chaotic state that provided a bolt-hole for terrorists. It is undoubtedly the greatest source of heroin on UK streets. Finally, it also has potentially devastating effects on Pakistan — a nuclear power and major keystone in the region's stability.
So even if we put to one side the sacrifices of our brave young soldiers, and the suffering of the ordinary Afghans, this war deserves more resources, more political effort and imagination, and a clearer focus than we are giving it.
We need a military surge which involves a massive increase in force, to both decapitate the Taliban and deny them control of the countryside. We need a security policy that allows ordinary Afghans to get their goods to market without paying levies to the Taliban, common bandits and corrupt policemen, levies that make it pointless growing any cash crop other than poppy.
We need to have a blitz on corruption at the national and provincial level, and an imaginative use of the tribal system to deliver justice at the local level. We need to start implementing our aid policy seriously, rather than the dilettantish dabbling we are currently undertaking. It should focus hard on the economic infrastructure, roads and irrigation, since poverty is the big enemy.
Most of all we need a massive increase in the size of the Afghan National Army. The American counter-insurgency field manual implies that Afghanistan should have about 600,000 indigenous soldiers, about the size of the security forces in Iraq. That number is probably a minimum. It is much greater than the current plans.
This is important for several reasons. It is the only way we will be able to take and hold the countryside. It will put real power into a coherent Afghan State. And it will answer the question in every Afghan mind, namely what happens when the Westerners leave? At the moment the answer is the return of the Taliban. That would not be so with a proper Afghan Army, and as a result the ordinary Afghan would, for the first time, have good reason to support us. This may cost money but it is money the West should be willing to subsidise.
Whoever wins the presidential election, they must understand some things have to happen and progress must now be made. There is a price on the commitment of our troops. The British public are impatient for success and will not tolerate indefinitely our soldiers' involvement in an open-ended conflict.
If we carry through this strategy, we will have a decent chance of creating a stable Afghan state, and of bringing this operation to a conclusion with honour and dignity. If we do not do it then our strategic indecision will throw away all the tactical victories that our brave young soldiers buy with their lives. That would be both a political and a moral failure, indeed it would be a disgrace. If we believe this war was worth starting, we should believe it is worth winning.
David's Google article in The Times
I wouldn’t trust Google with my personal info: My party would be mad to give control of sensitive records to an internet giant notorious for ignoring privacy concerns
When I read in the pages of this newspaper this month that the Conservative Party was planning to transfer people’s health data to Google, my heart sank. The policy described was so naive I could only hope that it was an unapproved kite-flying exercise by a young researcher in Conservative HQ. If not, what was proposed was both dangerous in its own right, and hazardous to the public acceptability of necessary reforms to the state’s handling of our private information.
There are powerful arguments for people owning their own information and having rights to control it. There are massive weaknesses in the NHS’s bloated central database and there are benefits from using the private sector. But there are also enormous risks, so we are still a long step from being able to give personal data to any company, let alone Google.
Google is the last company I would trust with data belonging to me. In the words of human rights watchdog Privacy International, Google has “a history of ignoring privacy concerns. Every corporate announcement has some new practice involving surveillance”. It gave Google the lowest possible assessment rating: “hostile to privacy”. It was the only company of the 20 assessed to get this rating. It also said Google was leading a “race to the bottom” among internet firms, many of which did little to protect their users.
This highlights how careful we must be in using private companies to handle personal data. Actual and potential misuse of such data will be a recurrent public concern of the next several decades. This is because of the huge commercial value of a near-monopoly internet presence, combined with legally unfettered use of personal data. This is what gives Google a market capitalisation of $130 billion (£79 billion). It represents the value of exploiting its customers’ private data for commercial ends.
There is little the state can do about this. It cannot cut back Google’s monopoly, because it arises properly from the fact that Google provides a service people want. The state should impose some limits on how personal data is managed, anonymised and used, but that is a slow, technically difficult and international process. We should not disapprove of the profitability of Google, but we should recognise that the size of its profits have a dramatic effect on corporate behaviour.
It was the prospect of huge profits that pushed Google into its amoral deal with China and drove its high- handed approach to the intrusion on people’s privacy with Streetview. These profits also explain its cavalier approach to European legislation (which it claims does not apply to it). This means we have to be rigorous about how we allow any private- sector operator to manage state-originated personal data.
A Conservative spokesman was quoted last week as saying: “We fully expect that there will be multiple providers that will almost certainly be free to users.” If so, the question arises of how the providers will pay for it. It should not be possible to make money out of holding health data. Health information has to be secure, and should not be available to be used for commercial purposes. That means it should not be sold on, it should not be data mined for commercial insights, and it should not be used for targeted advertising.
Furthermore, any companies allowed to hold this data must be required to do so on computers within the UK, with no possibility of transfer. This is the only way we can enforce UK privacy standards and laws. Paradoxically, such a contract might be of no interest to Google, because it denies the opportunity to profit from data exploitation. If a new government is not careful about these so-called “post-bureaucratic” policies, data-loss and data-misuse scandals will kill public confidence in it. This would be a tragedy.
There is value in letting people nominate where their personal data is to be kept. Ownership, control, and “property rights” in the trail of online information that makes up our virtual identities should rest with each individual. That is the only way we can navigate the world of opportunity and risk that the web offers. It is also a good idea to have competitive private sector companies, holding your secure data. Indeed, it is sensible to have many companies, since financial data is better kept in a separate place to medical data.
Commercial companies are not perfect, but they have a greater incentive to protect your data. One successful class-action suit for losing or abusing data could bankrupt a company. The reputational damage could certainly cripple it. So they will try harder than any government to avoid disastrous failures like HMRC’s loss of 25 million personal records.
So private companies are better than the state, but they are not saints. Accordingly, before any government privatises personal data management, we should be clear about the rules and the structure. The protection of the individual’s right to control his or her own data must be plain and strong. An individual is unlikely to mount, let alone win, a legal challenge against a large corporation unless that is so.
That is so even for their personal “commercial” data, such as shopping patterns. When it comes to more private information such as health records or tax-and-benefit history, we should go one step further and learn from the financial crash of the past two years. The financial “masters of the universe” were allowed to be too big to challenge, and too big to fail. Only three years ago, they were “cool”. Now they cripple our economy with their incompetence.
It is a similar situation with the companies we eventually entrust with our personal data. They have to be subject to personal, judicial, and national influence. They should not be beyond control. So when we are handing out these state contracts, being a multinational mega- corporation is for once a competitive disadvantage. Google need not apply.
David's article in the Sunday Times
We Tories will make your eyes water
Conventional wisdom advises opposition politicians not to talk about spending plans. This has been doubly true since John Smith’s disastrous shadow budget before the 1992 general election.
It is, of course, rubbish. Despite Gordon Brown’s attempts to represent the division between the parties as between Labour investment and Tory cuts, the vast majority of the public knows that whoever wins the election will cut spending. The issue is not who will cut spending; it is who will tell the truth. We are in one of those rare times in politics when the public vote will reward courage over caution.
The old excuses will not work. “We have to wait to see the books” will properly be dismissed as a lame excuse. We all know the state we are in. Even Brown’s decade of creative accounting cannot conceal the depth of the hole.
First, there are political, practical and principled arguments for eyewatering honesty about our economic prospects. It is an inescapable fact that the next government will have to carry through some unpalatable changes. That means the next government will not just need a majority; it will need a mandate. That means the public will need to know precisely what it is voting for.
Second, credibility matters with the markets at least as much as with the public. The government’s credit rating is on probation. The credit default swap rates for UK government bonds have climbed significantly higher than their German, French and US equivalents. An overt and credible fiscal strategy will minimise the economic wreckage that a new government will have to deal with.
Finally, there is a moral argument for the public being involved in this process. This is not just about counting the pennies. The size of the problem means a new government will have to undertake a radical recasting of some aspects of the public sector. The decisions forced on us by Brown’s incompetence will change the shape of government.
At the next election the public will be making a fundamental choice about the sort of state it wants. It will be making a serious judgment about the nation’s priorities. It is democratically essential that the public is engaged in the debate about those priorities. Anything else is paternalism gone mad.
How do we deliver a viable plan that the public understands and accepts?
We are set to borrow more than £600 billion in the next four years. That amounts to about £25,000 per household per year. There is no way we could cover that cost in increased taxes. Other countries have been in similar quandaries before, if not on quite such a scale. The fashionable example is Canada, but Sweden in the 1990s did a pretty good job, too. There are lessons to learn.
The first is that simple belt-tightening will not do it. While the government’s spectacular incompetence in public spending should, in theory, create great scope for savings, in practice it is tough. Much of the cost increase has been in wages, which are hard to reverse. The Canadian experience tells us that uniform cuts across the board, pay freezes and spending caps do not deliver the necessary savings.
Second, for them to work, the spending decisions have to be decentralised to those who devise and administer the policies. It is strongly in the public interest that shadow ministers should start that process with senior civil servants now. This process binds the principal actors to the project and recognises that policies have cost implications. One such area is the enormous welfare budget, traditionally a minefield. Tory policies are tougher than Labour’s: they will have to be tougher still to deliver the savings necessary.
Third, the Conservatives have to challenge everything. Is this policy or programme necessary? If so, must the government provide it? If it must, can it be contracted out? If the state must do it, can it do so more efficiently? In doing this, the Conservatives must understand there are no sacred cows. Whole programmes, such as the Trident upgrade, can and should go. Similarly, middle-class welfare, such as child benefits and winter fuel payments for the well-off, should be cut. Politics is the language of priorities and this is never more true than in decisions on spending.
This should be a transparent, almost public, process. Even those areas that are ring-fenced, such as the National Health Service and international development, should go through it. This would be a unique process, but we are in a unique situation.
Because it is less than a year from an election, we can expect access to the appropriate civil servants. Because there is likely to be a change of government, we can expect this financial and policy planning process to be taken seriously.
The Canadian government eradicated its deficit in three years. Our deficit is bigger, so the task is greater and will take a whole parliament, which is all the more reason to start the debate now.
David's Trident article in the Financial Times
Trident can live to deter another day
The current pressure on national spending plans mean we have to challenge every government spending decision from fundamental principles. This is particularly true of the big programmes, no matter how politically difficult. One of the obvious, but controversial, big programmes is the proposed Trident upgrade, estimated to cost about £20bn ($33bn, €23bn).
Do we need a nuclear deterrent? There is no denying that the world's political climate has changed in the half century since we became a nuclear power. Our threats are no longer principally from rival large-scale nuclear powers, but from rogue states. They may even be from terrorist groups, against whom retaliation would be an irrelevance.
In January, Field Marshal Lord Bramall, former chief of the defence staff, General Lord Ramsbotham and General Sir Hugh Beach described it as "virtually irrelevant" and argued for the funds behind it to be used to provide the army "with what they need to meet the commitments actually laid upon them".
I do not agree with this argument. It seems to me perverse that we have a nuclear deterrent when we face one or two hostile nuclear powers, both with stable (albeit unpleasant) governments, but abandon it when we have a proliferation of relatively unstable nuclear antagonists.
But that does not mean we should squander money on an upgrade. The reason we decommissioned the cheaper air-dropped WE177 nuclear bombs in the 1990s and kept Trident was because the Trident system was designed to survive an all-out Soviet attack with sufficient power to retaliate. That threat is much reduced, and the bigger threat is of one or two probably inaccurate nuclear weapons from a rogue state.
On that basis what we have now is more than enough and certainly does not require an upgrade. We simply have to consider how to keep what we have viable. In its 2006 white paper, the government announced plans to buy into the US scheme to extend the life of the Trident missiles until 2042, and continue co-operation with a new design of missile. On the face of it, this is the most economically viable choice.
A more pressing problem is the renewal of the four Vanguard-class submarines. In the white paper, the government was adamant that because the Vanguards were only designed to last 25 years, essential components, including parts of the nuclear propulsion systems, could only be renovated to last a further five years, and that at disproportionate cost.
This is nonsense. Richard Garwin, former chair of the US government's science advisory committee, told our defence select committee that inexpensive engine repairs could easily extend the life of the Vanguards for 15 years, and save the government making what he described as a "premature and wasteful decision".
The US Ohio-class submarines were designed at the same time as the Vanguards with the same life expectancy. Now they have had their lives extended to 40 years. Do we build poorer submarines? Or is it just the Ministry of Defence's procurement executive doing its trick of putting service politics before the truth?
It should be an obvious choice to extend the Vanguards' life, at least to coincide with that of the D5 missiles. Although cabinet ministers now appear to be dithering over plans to design and build a new generation of submarines, the official public stance is still to press ahead with a Vanguard replacement. This project faces a glaring problem: what if the new missiles, to be introduced less than halfway through its lifespan, don't fit? The MoD claims to have US assurances that any new missile will be compatible, but the public accounts committee has rightly noted that "there is no guarantee it will".
Another considerably less-expensive option would be to convert an existing Astute-class hunter-killer submarine. While this carries the same non-compatibility risks as a whole new submarine design, it would waste considerably less money if the worst-case scenario occurred.
In this era of tight budgets it is evident that we should save the £20bn on an upgrade and make the Trident system last. The debate should be not about that, but about whether in this era of diffuse, lower-grade threat, we should save billions more by having three, not four, boats.
David's Afghanistan article in the Independent
Afghanistan - the right war fought in the wrong way
It has been fashionable these last few years to view Afghanistan as the "good" war and Iraq as the "bad" war. This judgement is probably correct, but Afghanistan has been the right war fought in the wrong way, pursuing the wrong strategy, at the wrong time. What we now see as phase one of the Afghan war, the overthrow of the government in 2002, was brilliantly executed. From then, everything has gone wrong.
Firstly, we were distracted by the Iraq war, and largely left the new Afghan "democracy" under Hamid Karzai to its own devices. We turned a blind eye to the massive corruption – more than 20 families have become multi-millionaires from it in seven years. We ignored the monstrous growth of the Afghan poppy crop, with its legacy of heroin addiction and crime on western streets.
We did nothing to prevent the entrenchment of major and minor warlords running governmental baronies in pursuit of criminal gains, at the very real cost of ordinary Afghans. Finally, when we did intervene it was in a poorly planned, badly executed and under-resourced manner, calculated only to stir up resentment with little beneficial outcome.
We started with confused aims. We wanted to defeat the Taliban, although did not know which Taliban – the foreign radicals, the religious extremists, the criminals, the out-of-favour warlords or those with a real (and often justifiable) grudge against the government. Today, we are in principle willing to negotiate with all but the first of these.
In military terms, we massively underestimated what resources were needed to bring Helmand province under control, and we are still doing so. Inadequate numbers of soldiers have been exacerbated by deficiencies in equipment, from body armour to helicopters. We should not kid ourselves; equipment will not stop the inexorable count of lost and damaged lives. However, every life lost will be wasted if we do not have a clear view of what we want as a final outcome, and how to achieve it.
Our primary aim is to deny would-be terrorists a place in which they can organise and train, and from which they can strike out at our citizens. To do that, we have to have a strong and stable Afghan government, and to do that we need a people who are comfortable with their regime. That does not demand a Jeffersonian democracy, with all the appurtenances of the liberal state, from universal education and healthcare through to strong civic standards and gender equality, much as we would all like that. All it needs to deliver is justice and security to ordinary Afghans. If it can do that, the rest will come in due course.
This may sound more reminiscent of government in the Roman Empire rather than the 21st century. Regrettably, at the moment, we cannot even deliver that. In the Commons this week, Gordon Brown said we need to deliver justice on the ground. Quite right. He went on: "Not the medieval brutality of the Taliban, but the rule of law." This, I am afraid, shows he does not know what is going on.
Last October, I was in Afghanistan and I talked at length with people from Helmand province. What they told me was horrifying. Put to one side the incessant tales of theft, drug running, kidnap, extortion, rape and even murder by the Afghan National Police themselves. What they also told me was that the ordinary Afghan citizens seeking justice had two options. One was to bribe the national justice system to get a trial in perhaps a year, then eventually bribe the judge to get the outcome they want. Alternatively, they would walk five or ten miles to a Taliban village, get a hearing in a day and a fair ruling in a week.
As for security, our government does not appear to have any concept of what is needed to build a secure state. The current plans envisage about 134,000 Afghan soldiers and about 90,000 police. Iraq is a smaller country than Afghanistan, is less complex, either geographically or tribally, and has a history of stable central government. It has over 600,000 security forces, nearly three times those planned for Afghanistan.
So, it is time our political leaders got a grip. Our brave young soldiers will go on winning every battle, but the cost in lives will be tragically wasted if the political classes throw away the war. We need more coalition soldiers on the ground, of course. We need more equipment, no doubt. But most of all we need an achievable model of a stable, secure and decent Afghan state, and an idea of how to achieve it – and today we do not have that at all.
David's article on Grammar Schools in the Mail on Sunday
Bec Grammar gave this kid with scuffed shoes chances he had never dreamed of. That's why we must bring back these inspiring schools
It is almost 50 years since I won admission to grammar school, yet I remember it as though it were yesterday. It was a day that changed my life massively, for the better. Bec Grammar School in Tooting, South London, took this young kid from the wrong side of the tracks, with scuffed shoes, tousled hair, shirt hanging out of his trousers, and gave him chances he had never dared to dream of.
And they did the same for hundreds of thousands of children from poor homes, council estates and broken homes, through the post-war years. The simple truth is that grammar schools were the greatest instrument for social mobility ever invented.
Today, some people seem to believe grammar schools are middle-class institutions which reinforce class divisions rather than remove them. Well, if you shut inner-city grammar schools that serve working-class areas - as we did - then most of those who are left will be middle class. If you then limit places to fewer than the number of youngsters capable of filling them, the affluent, aspirant middle-class will fight for and dominate those places.
It was not always so. I was by no means the only working-class youngster, or son of a single mother, in my grammar school. Many of my classmates were very tough. It was a community with few angels and no saints.
In the year I left Bec Grammar, as it was known, a controversial film called Up The Junction was released. It was about an upper-class girl who went to live in a lower-class community: a typical British gritty social drama set in crowded terraced streets and run-down council estates.
And where was this film shot? Bang in the middle of the catchment area of my grammar school. And yet my school has produced William Armstrong, Cabinet Secretary during Edward Heath's administration, Seventies English rugby captain Bob Hiller, and a host of people who reached the upper levels of the professional, academic and managerial classes.
Working-class grammar schools were incredibly successful at taking spirited and sometimes disorderly youngsters and turning them into disciplined and productive citizens.
They did that with an ethos that inspired respect, success, effort and ambition, whether in the classroom or on the sports field.
You only have to look at their results to see that grammar schools were great escalators to opportunity for poorer children. A child from a poor home who scored eight B grades at GCSE in a comprehensive would score eight As at a grammar school.
This is why social mobility improved markedly in Britain immediately after the war. Until about 1958, of every 100 born into the poorest quarter of society, only 31 would remain there. The rest would improve their lot before they got to the age of 30.
When next measured, with those born around 1970, the number stuck at the bottom had risen by almost a quarter, to 38 per cent.
Detailed study of the numbers shows that for those born after 1970, poorer children began to do less well in the education system, and rich kids did better. The arrival of the comprehensive system meant a return to the neighbourhood school - described dismissively by Tony Blair's spin doctor Alastair Campbell as 'bog-standard comprehensives' - in the poor areas.
Ironically, in a system designed to be more egalitarian, some of the poshest schools in the country are now smart comprehensives in wealthy areas. They are very good schools, but poor kids cannot get in because their parents cannot afford the premium on the price of homes in the catchment area.
The demise of the grammars, and the growth of the socially selective comprehensive, have left Britain at the bottom of the international social mobility league.
This need not be so. Look at Northern Ireland, which kept grammar schools. There, 42 per cent of university entrants come from poorer backgrounds. The defenders of our current system try to say 'it's different' - as if poverty, sectarian divides, and a recent civil war make educational success somehow easier.
Schools Secretary Ed Balls will this week announce yet more tinkering with State education. None of it would be necessary if Mr Balls had the courage to admit the stark truth. His own party's wanton destruction of grammars did more damage to the prospects of their own working-class supporters than any other political decision in the past 50 years.
Mr Balls should know better. His parents did not send him to a comprehensive but to fee-paying Nottingham High School - also, by the way, the alma mater of his erstwhile Cabinet colleague Geoff Hoon. As a child, Mr Balls even lived briefly at Eton College, while his father taught there for a term.
Instead of constantly meddling with a failed system, Mr Balls should study the success of grammars in the post-war years to maximise every child's potential, not in the private sector from which he and a privileged few benefited, but in the state sector.
Of course, grammars were not perfect. The 11-plus exam led to mistakes and friends who went to neglected secondary modern schools often felt abandoned. The technical schools planned after the war were never built.
It could have been so much better, but there was no need to wreck grammars. The 11-plus could be redesigned to reflect aptitude, not just learned skills. It could be taken at 11, 12 and 13, to give children three chances.
We need to raise the standard of all secondary schools. It can be done - look at Northern Ireland again, where seven in ten children get five good GCSEs. Since only a quarter go to grammar school, most get them in other parts of the secondary system.
Some people say middle-class parents do not like selection if their own children fail. With an improved system that would not be so. It certainly is not the case in Northern Ireland, where many are resisting Sinn Fein's attempt to destroy the system.
But my main concern is with the poor. If we carry on as we are, we are throwing away the opportunities and life chances of about 15,000 boys and girls from poorer households every year.
The terrible irony is that the main consequence of the egalitarian drive to destroy grammar schools is to massively boost public schools and their pupils.
As things stand, the products of the independent sector are increasingly dominating our society. Jeremy Paxman and David Dimbleby did not just both go to public school, they went to the same public school, Charterhouse.
The top ranks of the media, big business, the law - indeed the past four Chief Justices - are drawn from public schools.
I have no problem with this. I favour allowing parents to do the best possible for their children, including sending them to fee-paying schools. But we should also give the best possible chance to those who cannot afford that, and the best way to do this is to bring back grammar schools.
There were no halcyon days in our past. But for those kids, with the capability but not the cash, the aptitude but not the opportunity, with all the talent but none of the chances, there is little doubt - grammar schools were best.
David Davis resigns as a Member of Parliament over the Government’s plans to extend pre-charge detention to 42 days. more
11 July 08
David Davis wins by-election with 70% of the vote. more
13 Oct 08
The House of Lords rejects the Government’s proposal of42 days pre-charge detention by 309 votes to 118, forcing Gordon Brown to drop the clause from the Counter Terrorism Bill. more
5 Nov 08
The Government defeated again in the House of Lords over the Counter Terrorism Bill, this time over issue of keeping people’s DNA and fingerprint on the police national database. more
7 Nov 08
The Home Office reveals that the cost of ID cards has crept up by £50 million in the past sixth months to almost £5 billion, as it announces a pilot scheme. more
25 Nov 08
The first compulsory ID cards since the 1950s were issued this week to thousands of foreign nationals living in the country, the Home Office announced. more
28 Nov 08
Damian Green MP arrested and his home and Parliamentary Office were searched as part of a police inquiry into Home Office leaks. more
16 April 09
Charges against Damian Green were dropped by the CPS, who have said that “there was no evidence that national security had been put at risk”. Green, who was arrested in November, described the affair as “the first arrest of an opposition politician for doing his job, since Britain became a democracy”. more
29 April 09
David Blunkett calls for ID cards to be scrapped,the ‘father’ of the ID cards scheme, suggested that biometric passports could replace the controversial scheme. more
3 May 09
DNA profiles of 800,000 innocent people will be removed by the police, in response to the ECHR ruling last year. They include people who have been arrested and never charged, and those taken to court but found not guilty. more
11 June 09
Law Lords have ruled unanimously, that the use of secret evidence breached human rights legislation, dealing a major blow to the governments controversial use of control orders on terrorist suspects. more
David's article on the Speaker in the Mail on Sunday
Only the Speaker can restore faith in Parliament. That is why Mr Martin must go
Sunday, 18th May
WHEN Michael Martin was first up for election as Speaker, I was going to second one of his rivals for the job, Gwyneth Dunwoody. Her proposer was to be Mo Mowlam. Then, ten minutes before the debate to choose the Speaker, Gwyneth came bustling up to me.
'Can you propose me rather than second me?' she said.
'Why, what's happened to Mo?' I replied.
'No 10 have ordered her not to propose me.'
I was astonished. The unwritten rule of the Commons is that Party organisations and Government keep out of matters such as this. It was a clear breach of convention.
So I proposed Gwyneth, unsuccessfully as it turned out. Nevertheless, when Michael Martin won, I was determined to give him the benefit of the doubt.
So I watched with incredulity last week as the Speaker verbally attacked two MPs in the Chamber. At that point all the nagging worries I had had about Michael Martin came to a head.
The truth is that over the years he has made the wrong decisions and given the wrong leadership on almost every vital issue at the heart of running our democracy.
When my Conservative colleague Damian Green was arrested earlier this year, the Speaker made an appalling misjudgment in letting the police into the Commons. Even now we have not got to the bottom of the Damian Green affair.
The committee to investigate the matter has not even been set up. People wonder if something is being covered up.
The Speaker's first responsibility is to protect the ordinary backbenchers' ability to do their job - yet only last week he failed to do so again. Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming found that a constituent was threatened with imprisonment if he spoke to his MP about a family court matter.
Mr Hemming sought to have that referred to the Standards and Privileges Committee. The Speaker blocked it.
Then we come to the corrosive issue of MPs' expenses. The public is rightly angry about this, and I have been criticised for claiming money for repairs to my second home. However, I have discussed it with constituency association officers and they agree I have done nothing wrong.
The Speaker has been told repeatedly the thorny issue of expenses must be sorted out and has taken the wrong turn at almost every stage of the process. He should have acceded to the original Freedom of Information request and tightened up the rules and systems much sooner.
Last week David Cameron recognised the scale of the public anger and acted decisively. But one
party leader cannot fix the whole Parliament. Only the Speaker can do that. A strong Speaker would have called in the party leaders years ago, and told them in terms how he was going to fix it.
Instead we are in a position where the standing of our entire Parliamentary system is in freefall. Only the Speaker has the authority and position to grasp this nettle, but this Speaker has lost that authority. His judgment is questioned, his credibility gone.
So it is with some regret I have come to the conclusion the Speaker should stand down.
My strong preference is he should go of his own accord. There is no dishonour in standing down before the General Election.
His predecessor Betty Boothroyd went halfway through a Parliament to allow MPs with Commons experience under their belt to elect someone they knew - rather than have a large number of newlyelected MPs choose from candidates they had barely met.
Labour need not worry about being forced to hold a by-election that they could well lose. The suggestion that there must be one is wide of the mark.
And uncertainty over who will take over is no excuse for hesitation. I have no idea who will take the seat - I can only guarantee it will not be me. The only test we should apply is: can he or she get a grip and return the reputation of Parliament to where it should be?
There have been times in our history when a strong Speaker has been pivotal in our national affairs. Speaker Lenthall famously stood up to Charles I with his words: 'I have neither eyes to see, nor tongue to speak in this place, but as this House directs me.'
Being Speaker was dangerous. The next Speaker will also face dangers: the danger that Parliament has become an irrelevance, that the trust between electors and the elected has been irrevocably shattered and that MPs have lost faith in their own ability to change things for the better.
We need a new Speaker who can live up to the courage and independence of Speaker Lenthall and whose eyes only see and whose tongue only speaks as the will of the British people directs.
The will of the people is clear. That will must be expressed firmly by a new Speaker of the House, and it must be done now.
David's article on Afghanistan published in The Independent
David Davis: Brown's policy in Afghanistan is never going to work
Friday, 1 May 2009
On Wednesday Gordon Brown outlined his latest strategy for Afghanistan, by announcing a temporary increase in troops, additional funding to tackle poverty and promote education, and an increased emphasis on training the Afghan army and police force. The greatest weakness in this new approach is that it does not plausibly answer the first question that enters the mind of any Afghan when he sees foreigners in uniform.
That question is "When are you leaving?"
This should not be a surprise in a country that has received and expelled so many invaders in its long history. It is a question that arises partly from pride, but also from self preservation. The fate of any Afghan that miscalculates who will be around in ten years time is impoverishment, oppression, and possibly death, for himself, but also for his family.
Which leads to the second question, which is "What will you leave behind? Who will be in charge? Will he last? Will his writ run beyond the suburbs of Kabul?"
In other words, how are you going to guarantee the effective survival of the central state in a country where it more often than not fails, and where few people are really aware of its existence.
The answer given by the Prime Minister was, in truth, spectacularly inadequate. The single most important issue is the security of the state. The guarantor of that security cannot be foreign, it must in the long run be Afghan. It must also be powerful.
Now compare the reality of today's Iraq with the proposed future for Afghanistan. Iraq is smaller, less complex, richer, and better educated than Afghanistan. It has a stronger history as a stable state. Today it requires 600,000 security forces to maintain its fragile integrity. Yet Gordon Brown seems to believe that Afghanistan, with its history of lawlessness, its civil wars, its drugs trade, and its meddlesome neighbours, can prosper on a total security force of some 200,000 men
What is more, about a third of those security forces are expected to be policemen. The Afghan National Police are not just a poor instrument of law and order; they are an active agent of criminality.
Two thirds of them are drug addicts, and the majority are deliberate criminal oppressors of the ordinary Afghan. Systematic extortion, kidnap, theft, and rape are their stock in trade. So they do not add to security, they subtract from it. At least three quarters of the force is beyond recovery, and the best option is likely to be to start again, with a completely new force. That is not to say the task is impossible.
The Afghan National Army is different again. A conventional soldier might be horrified to watch their casual behaviour. They have faults – occasional cruelty, tribalism, variable leadership, but they are manageable. To have a chance, however, there will need to be at least four times as many as is being proposed. Without that sort of number, Afghanistan will revert to a lawless, drug-ridden bolt-hole for terrorists and insurgents. The Taliban will win, and al-Qa'ida will be the beneficiary.
We must persuade the Afghan people that we are creating a viable, long-term Afghan security solution. We must answer the question "what comes next" in a way that stops the current slow but inexorable drift back to the Taliban.
A proper Afghan security force will be expensive. The annual subsidy would need to be about $3 billion, and that is after the upfront training costs. However, it will be cheaper, in blood and treasure, than the alternative ineffective endgame, and it will offer an exit that is better than the humiliation that is currently on the cards.
Furthermore, it is not essential that Britain and America shoulder the entire burden. So far ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force, has been pathetically incompetent. One American journalist in Kabul described it to me as a "combination of nations, some of whom can't fight, and some who won't fight."
While this is unfair to some nations, it is broadly right. We would do better to persuade its allies to help with the financing of the Afghan security force, and give up on (most countries') expansion of military support. That may make the long term costs more bearable, and also reflect the importance to the whole world of bringing both drugs and terrorism under control.
We stand at an historic crossroads on this. If we are (a lot) tougher on the corruption of the Karzai regime; ensure delivery of justice on the ground, even if it is tribal justice; and create a security force that underpins a viable government, we stand a chance of delivering what no foreigner has ever done before, namely a successful Afghan state. If not, we will be allowing the waste of countless lives to achieve little more than Vietnam.
Read David's, Financial Times article calling for a debate on how to cut public spending
It is time for debate on how to cut public spending
Last week’s grim Budget had a useful function. It showed in stark terms what Britain’s future will be if we do not grasp the nettle of the public finances, and grasp it firmly: a never-ending cycle of soaring debt, rising taxes, weakening competitiveness, falling growth and lower tax revenue.
The choice we face is not between Labour growth in public services and Tory “cuts”. It is between taking a grip of the public finances and watching our people’s economic prospects, and our ability to afford decent public services, slowly dribble away.
What can we do? It is clear that the chancellor Alistair Darling’s “efficiency savings” will not do it. With deficits of about £25,000 a household for the next four years, we will not make ends meet by cutting back on paperclips. Two-thirds of the government’s previously claimed savings have proved illusory and the rest will be swamped by the underlying cost increases this year.
While the government’s spectacular incompetence in public spending – doubling the cost of healthcare and education, with only marginal improvements – should, in theory, create great scope for savings, in practice it is tough. Much of the cost increase has been in wages, which are ferociously hard to reverse. The first stages of an austerity regime, involving pay and recruitment freezes for the entire public sector, will be controversial and uncomfortable. But they will not be enough. We are going to have to close all public sector pension schemes to new entrants. Where salaries have really got out of line, as with doctors’ pay, lower starting rates should be introduced.
I would also cancel senior civil service bonuses. It would save only £25m, but the symbolism is important – as it would be with other sensible actions, such as cutbacks in MPs’ expenses and cabinet ministers’ pay.
However, for meaningful savings we are going to have to be more radical – and that means cancelling things. There are some easy hits. I announced that the Conservatives would cancel identity cards some time ago and, as some of the smarter members of the government have now realised, that will save billions. This should be extended to many of the government’s proposed databases, from the £2bn internet scrutiny schemes, down to the silly Contact Point children’s database, whose running costs are £44m a year.
I would also seek to renegotiate every private finance initiative contract. They are coming up for renegotiation in the next five to 10 years anyway. Why wait for the surge in capital costs that will follow quantitative easing in the medium term? We should strike deals now, while money is cheap.
But the big numbers are in the departments, particularly the burgeoning welfare budget, currently heading towards £180bn within two years. Much of this is a direct consequence of Gordon Brown’s badly designed, fraud- and error-prone tax credit system.
Along with a number of his welfare gimmicks, such as winter fuel payments and free television licences for the over-75s, he has created a system of benefits that amount to welfare for the well-off. But to provide welfare for the wealthy, the poor will pay. So we should target child benefit solely on the least well off, and replace winter fuel payments and other gimmicks with targeted help for poor pensioners. After allowing plenty to protect poor parents and pensioners, the savings would be £9bn-£10bn a year.
Another simple abolition is that of regional government. Any remaining functions should either go down to the counties or back to the centre.
We should also, as Conservatives, address some of our own sacred cows. There is no firmer advocate of nuclear deterrence than me, but even I have some difficulty seeing the justification for a wholesale upgrade of Trident. Our system was designed to maintain retaliatory capacity after a full-scale Soviet nuclear onslaught. Now our likeliest nuclear adversary will be a much smaller, less-sophisticated state. Should not the costs reflect that?
Everyone will have their own ideas, and it is good that we are starting to have the debate out in the open. The public are not fools and they are ready for politicians to think the unthinkable – 70 per cent see the need to bring public spending under control. They know that these issues will determine whether we slip unhappily into a miserable future in the economic second division, or find a route back to the vibrant and competitive economy we once were. They do not believe this government has the courage to tell them the truth. They are waiting for one that will.
David's article on the arrest of Damien Green published in The Independent
How can Jacqui Smith escape responsibility for this outrage?
WHEN HENRY II bellowed "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?" and four of his knights journeyed to Kent to murder Thomas a Becket, he famously showed abject contrition by walking to Canterbury in sackcloth and ashes.
When Jacqui Smith's petty tantrums at leaks from the Home office set in chain a series of events that ended in a posse of Counter Terrorism officers journeying to Kent to arrest Damian Green, we saw no such contrition. Her responses went from "I didn't know," to "It's not my responsibility," to "It would have been irresponsible not to have done it." That last claim was based on the assertion that national security was at risk.
Let us put to one side the Home Secretary's inability to distinguish the nation's security from her own political insecurity, and consider the facts from a man who is both independent and has all the facts, the Director of Public Prosecutions. He said,
"I have concluded that the information leaked was not secret information or information affecting national security.
"It did not relate to military, policing or intelligence matters. It did not expose anyone to a risk of injury or death. Nor, in many respects, was it highly confidential. Much of it was known to others outside the civil service, for example, in the security industry or the Labour Party or Parliament. Moreover, some of the information leaked undoubtedly touched on matters of legitimate public interest, which were reported in the press."
Throughout this case Ministers have tried to imply that there was some hidden sinister aspect to this case. Indeed, the letter to the police from the Cabinet Office said in terms that there was a threat to national security. We now know that this was untrue, that it was either a lie or a piece of remarkable incompetence.
So how did it happen?
What the combination of the Damian McBride affair and the Damian Green affair tells us is that a culture of vindictiveness has grown up, in Whitehall in general and the Cabinet Office in particular. It is a culture that can only have originated from ministers and special advisers, since it is so at odds with the traditions of our Civil Service.
Indeed, the increasingly habitual use of the full power of the state to attack opponents of the government, be they whistleblowers or political rivals, is inimical to our entire liberal democratic tradition.
There are a number of questions left unresolved. Firstly we have not established whether Ministers were knowledgeable about these decisions and actions; and if they were not, why not? Police operational independence does not absolve Ministers from accountability. Are we seriously to believe that in the six month gestation of this case, no minister was consulted at any time?
Former Home Secretaries of both parties have said to me they are astonished that Jacqui Smith didn't know what was happening. She should have done. We also still have the unresolved question of Parliamentary privilege, which was undoubtedly breached in pursuit of this case.
It is the responsibility of Parliament and a free press to hold Government to account. When Governments lie or conceal information, as this one has done systematically, it is necessary to publish information from whistleblowers. They will not be possible if the police can seize parliamentary files whenever they feel like it.
Parliament also needs to consider the question of when criminal law can be used to protect confidential government information. If an employee leaks confidential information when working for a private company or individual - a celebrity's nanny, for example - they get the sack. They do not get arrested.
Government is only different in very limited circumstances, essentially involving national security. Those limited circumstances do not extend to protecting Labour politicians from embarrassment and exposure of their failures.
That is why the Damian Green affair is the second major case attempting to use "misconduct in public office" to gag whistleblowers to collapse in twelve months.
This law is antiquated, anachronistic, and has become a discretionary power for the Executive rather than a reliable protection for the people. It is time it was revoked or rewritten. After all, if we took the law literally, namely "misconduct in public office", this week we might end up arresting the Home Secretary.
David's article on torture and MI5 published in Observer
We did things differently in my day, Mr Miliband
The sunlight was streaming through the windows of MI6 headquarters as I sipped my Earl Grey tea from a bone china cup and gently teased the head of the Secret Intelligence Service. "You chaps are hardly James Bond these days, are you?" I said. "Why, you don't even kill people any more."
Sir Colin McColl smiled. "Well, that's because you don't ask us to, minister."
As the famed C, he was head of the organisation that ran Britain's spies and provided the backdrop for the stories crafted by Ian Fleming and John le Carré. He was a formidably intelligent and civilised man, as he had to be, providing as he did one of our major defences against the then Soviet threat. He no doubt viewed with quizzical amusement the impertinent badinage of the junior minister from the Cabinet Office, as I then was.
There was, however, a serious point. Sir Colin was an enthusiastic advocate of bringing his organisation out of the shadows and putting it on a legal footing. Until then, the British government had formally denied the existence of the Secret Intelligence Service. Now we were about to pass an act of parliament recognising its existence and creating the legal rules for its operation.
This created a real problem, however. Spies break the law. Burglary, bribery and blackmail are what they do. It is how they get the secrets that other countries are fighting to protect. While they existed in the shadows, this did not present a legal problem, but now they were going to be recognised as crown servants. It is a peculiarity of British law that civil servants and servants of the crown generally are bound by British law when working abroad, irrespective of where they are. So we had to create a way round this or see our espionage services crippled.
This led to the creation of what is known as the "James Bond opt-out". This allows our spies to break the law if, and only if, they get a warrant from the secretary of state, normally the foreign secretary. Before a warrant can be granted, the law requires the action to be absolutely necessary and proportionate to the eventual benefit to the nation. The warrant is specific and runs out after six months or sometimes sooner. The purpose of requiring explicit ministerial approval was to ensure that the "opt-out" from the law was never misused or, if it was, somebody would be held accountable. It was never remotely countenanced as covering killing or torture.
Last week, the attorney general referred the case of Binyam Mohamed to the police. This confirms what many of us already knew or suspected, that there is a prima facie case to answer that government agents colluded in the torture of one or several of the detainees picked up in Pakistan. It is important to understand what is meant by "colluded" in this case. It does not mean that British agents wielded the instruments of torture or were present when the pain was being inflicted. But neither does it simply mean negligence, as was suggested by one ill-informed, so-called security specialist on the BBC.
What has happened is that British agents have co-operated with foreign powers when they had good reason to believe that they were torturing British citizens or residents, providing information and questions to these foreign governments. This often involved getting the foreign agencies to put questions A, B and C under torture, so that once they had the answers, British agents could turn up and put the same questions without torture.
Pakistani intelligence service agents have told researchers that this procedure was followed with several different subjects and several different British agents. This is not about one "rogue agent". It is systemic. When the "James Bond opt-out" clause was created, it was done with advice from the legal advisers to MI5 and MI6. It is inconceivable that the requirement for a foreign secretary's warrant was not included in the standard operating procedure of the agencies involved. Given the severity of the laws against torture, both British and international, it is also inconceivable that it was not clear that the law was being broken.
So one of two things has happened. Either a foreign secretary has approved complicity in torture, in which case that foreign secretary should be on a criminal charge, or the system has suffered a massive breakdown, in which case heads should roll at the agency. But it is going to be difficult for the police, even with access to all the papers and all the British officers, to get to the core of the breakdown. Indeed, that is not their job. They will be looking, quite properly, to bring a criminal case against an individual.
What should happen is that a full inquiry should investigate all the cases and identify all the failures all the way to the top, including ministers. What should not happen is that some low-ranking official be made a scapegoat. The inquiry should also address the extent to which the government has been knowingly involved in a cover-up of this matter. The attorney general has made a reference to the police on the basis of 42 documents from the Binyam Mohamed trial. These are the documents that the foreign secretary asked the court to withhold from the public domain, initially on the spurious grounds that the Americans had threatened to cut off intelligence co-operation.
To stop the court releasing the documents, he issued three public interest immunity certificates. Before issuing such certificates, it was his duty to satisfy himself that the documents were a threat to national security. Not to read them would be irresponsible in the extreme. They total some 140 pages, which would take about two hours or so to read. But these are the documents that form the prima facie case of complicity in torture.
So the government has spent more than six months trying to keep out of the public domain documents that are critical in what is likely to end in a criminal case. In that time, both David Miliband and the home secretary have denied to the House of Commons that the government was complicit in any way in torture. If they were not telling the whole truth, that would be fatal to their ministerial careers. Yet it is difficult to see how it could be the whole truth, when they had both read the 42 documents that are now the basis of a criminal investigation.
We need a judicially led inquiry, with full access to the evidence and a broad remit to get to the bottom of what has gone wrong. We need that inquiry now and we need it to be held where possible in public, because it is time that people are told what has happened, if only so that our nation never allows such a moral failure to happen again.
To read David's article in full, please click here.
David Speaks in Commons Economy Debate
David made a speech in a Commons Debate on the economy held on the 18th March in which he developed the points he first made in an article published in the Sunday Telegraph on 1st March.
To read what David had to say, please follow the link below to see the full Hansard transcript of his speech:
David speaks in Commons debate on terrorism Control Orders
David spoke in the Commons today in a debate on the renewal of Control Order powers.
He raised several issues of concern with the legislation, concluding that "this is an unnecessary piece of law, and a bad piece of law. It does huge damage to the Government’s “prevent strategy”, and I suspect that, if anything, it makes the threat from terrorism worse."
For a full transcript of David's speech and to read the debate in full, please follow the link below to the Hansard Official Report.
Latest Article: Tony Blair was a naive leader whose idea of war was pure Hollywood
Tony Blair is truly astonishing. He is summoned to the Chilcot inquiry to answer questions, and instead he poses his own: "What if I had not invaded Iraq? Where would we be then?"
Put to one side the astonishing insensitivity of saying such a thing in a room in which at least 20 people could have replied: "My son would still be alive today." Let us answer his question.
And let us not be too prissy about it. He will not have been the first war leader to use secrecy and subterfuge to attain his ends. But he will be the first that I know of who bullied his attorney general, ignored his legal advisers, deluded his cabinet and dissembled to the House of Commons and the public to get his way.
Even if we accept that he felt he was acting in the public interest, these acts alone did enormous harm to that interest. He believes that weapons of mass destruction and state-sponsored terrorism are threats to modern society. So they are. Now consider how likely parliament or public are to believe any future prime minister if he says: "I have compelling intelligence of an imminent threat to this country."
So, by his excessive reaction to a non-existent threat, he has crippled the capability of future democratic governments to respond robustly to a real threat. He told the Chilcot inquiry that his perception and assessment of the risks posed by Iraq changed after 9/11. But that assessment was naive, ignorant, careless and inconsistent.
It was naive because there was no prior indication of links between Saddam and al-Qaida. Indeed there was evidence of hostility between them. It was ignorant because it ignored the known fact that there were a number of alternative bolt holes for al-Qaida in the many failed and dysfunctional states in the region, so shutting down one would not handicap them at all. It was careless because it took no account of the cause célèbre that invasion handed to Islamist fundamentalists the world over, and the recruiting sergeant for terrorism that it created in this country. It was inconsistent because he did few of the other things that this new threat demanded. In particular, he did not materially increase the size of our security services until 2004, nearly three years later, and too late to stop the 7/7 bombings. Unfortunately, the naivety did not stop there.
I suspect that, when they presented the "dodgy dossier", he and his advisers believed it. They appeared to have no grasp of the will-o'-the-wisp nature of much intelligence data. When I was the non-proliferation minister in the previous government, I saw weekly intelligence assessments of Iraq's capabilities and intentions. It was always clear that this intelligence was patchy and incomplete, like most intelligence on hostile nations.
Indeed, when Blair assured the House of Commons of the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), I assumed that we had acquired access to live data from a human source in place. Nothing else explained his confidence. It now transpires that his access was no greater than ours four years earlier. Possibly less.
Similarly naive was Blair's approach to warfare as an arm of state policy. When Margaret Thatcher was considering military action to retake the Falklands, the people who were most cautions were the Whitelaws, Carringtons and Pyms, who had seen warfare first hand. They had witnessed young men being burned and shattered by the weapons of modern warfare. They had no illusions about the hideous human cost.
Blair's concept of war seems pure Hollywood. He seems to forget the vast numbers of innocent casualties; the collateral damage and destruction; the pain, hunger and disease that are the fellow travellers of military action.
How else do we explain the cavalier carelessness with which he treated the follow-through to military action? He was told by the Ministry of Defence that there was no "phase four", the reconstruction and rebuilding of the nation that should have followed the invasion if there was to be any moral justification for "regime change".
Of all the people in the world, Blair was the one best placed to insist to George W Bush that the Americans take this seriously. At the very least, it should have been the price of our co-operation. Yet there is no evidence that he lifted a finger.
The result? One hundred thousand civilian casualties in Iraq. Even if we accept Blair's aims – and I did – there is no excuse for a British government to behave in this simplistic, careless, almost blinkered way.
Sometimes it is necessary for governments to spend lives, but when they do they should take very special care over both their aims and their methods. They should never spend any lives unnecessarily, and never spend one life more than necessary.
The final price of this war is not yet settled. It has not destroyed the morale of al-Qaida; if anything, it has given it a new moral cause. It distracted us from Afghanistan – the necessary war – and has rendered it a thousand times more difficult to resolve. And it has taken the west from a position of moral superiority to moral failure.
Where would we be without your war, Tony Blair? Even by your own criteria, in a rather better position than we are now, I fear.
David's article on the arrest of Damian Green MP published in Telegraph
David has written an article for the Telegraph Newspaper on the recent arrest of Damain Green MP and the search of his offices in the House of Commons and his constituency.
To read David's views on this, and his thoughts on how to avoid a similar incident occuring in the future, please follow the link below to the Telegraph website.
David's article on the ECtHR ruling on DNA retention published in Independent
David has written an article on the ruling handing by the European Court of Human Rights on the retention of the DNA profile of innocent people on the NAtional DNA Database.
The ruling is seen as a crushing condemnation of the GOvernments policy on DNA retention.
To read David's thoughts in full, please follow the link below to the Independent's website:
By David Davis Published: Thursday, 25 September 08 - 06:11 PM (GMT) Last Updated: Thursday, 25 September 08 - 06:16 PM (GMT)
David will be speaking on Monday at two fringe events at Conservative Party Conference- "An Audience with Rt. Hon. David Davis MP", and at a Liberty fringe event, “Human Rights, Common Values: Discussing the future challenges for rights protection in the UK”.
Details of both of these events and where to attend are in the events section.
David Davis Acceptance Speech, 11 July
By David Davis Published: Friday, 11 July 08 - 10:16 AM (GMT)
David Davis Acceptance Speech, 11 July
CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY First, may I thank the returning officer, his officials ad the police. I would also like to take the opportunity to commend the other parties that contested this election. One of the freedoms I defend is the right of anybody to stand in a democratic election. By and large this has been a courteous and entertaining campaign. I thank everyone for taking part. … Four weeks ago, I resigned my position as Shadow Home Secretary, and Member of Parliament. Not for personal gain. Not for political advantage. But to defend a principle.
The doubters said it couldn’t be done. You can’t win a by-election campaigning for freedom. You can’t shift public support for 42 days. You can’t spark a national debate, they said… people just don’t care about British liberty. And yet, 3 weeks on, we’ve sent a shot across the bows of Gordon Brown’s arrogant, arbitrary and authoritarian government. We’ve galvanised a new consensus … across the political spectrum … beyond the world of politics. A new resolve. A new spirit of freedom. A fresh sense of purpose.
Today, the people of Haltemprice and Howden have delivered a stunning message to the government…as our campaign has reverberated across the country. Four weeks ago as Gordon Brown stooped into the gutter to rig the vote on 42 days, Ministers crowed that 69% of people supported 42 days. Today just 36% support it. Four weeks ago, the government touted public support for a range of other draconian measures. Today, 71% support my stand against the attacks on British liberty. And in the House of Lords, the last Head of MI5 savaged the government’s 42 day proposal. It now lies in tatters, robbed of any remaining credibility. Along with this government. And that’s after just 3 weeks.
But today is not the end of this campaign. It’s the beginning. On Monday I return to the House of Commons, to take up my seat in those hallowed chambers. I do so with a clear mandate to fight Gordon Brown’s vision of ‘Big Brother Britain’ tooth and nail. To stop 42 days dead in its tracks. To prevent the disaster of ID cards before it happens. To protect our personal privacy from being ransacked by the ever-intrusive state.
But most of all for the thousands upon thousands who have written to me… Supported me …and voted for me…. I return to fight for those fundamental freedoms that define our way of life. The freedoms that millions died defending. The freedoms that make Britain Great. Thank you.
David's Observer Debate: Now Available to Download
By David Davis Published: Friday, 04 July 08 - 06:48 PM (GMT) Last Updated: Saturday, 05 July 08 - 11:24 AM (GMT)
The recent Observer Comment is Free debate featuring David Davis in a panel including former Labour Minister Denis MacShane, Times columnist David Aaronovitch and pro-civil liberties Observer journalist Henry Porter is now online to listen to and download from the following link:
Bob Geldof: In support of David Davis's Freedom campaign
By David Davis Published: Friday, 04 July 08 - 05:21 PM (GMT) Last Updated: Friday, 04 July 08 - 06:47 PM (GMT)
Check against delivery
This is not a normal by-election but it is extraordinary. The people of this area are being asked to consider not the merits or otherwise of the government or opposition, much less the competing policies of the different parties. Not even the beauty parade ofeager candidates, who looking at David and the motley assemblage of other candidates, once again reminds me of that great truth that politics is merely showbusiness for ugly people.
You are not even being asked to address the great financial issues and otherwise that are beginning to bite at this region and the country. Rising food, fuel, energy and inflation costs. House prices and manufacturing down. It doesn’t look or feel good out there. But that is not for this election. That is for another day.
This time you are being asked about something much more fundamental. More profound even than the momentary economic cycle and its impact on those who live here . This time you’re being asked to think about who we are. What we stand for and will we continue to live and be the country and people built by generations and institutions before. This is fight about the legal boundaries of the state and how much that state can and should remove of our liberties before it fundamentally changes the nature of who and what we are.
As a voting issue it may appear less immediate than the current financial downturn and therefore less compelling. Given the position of the other main parties the results may seem a foregone conclusion and the exercise of the vote tiresome, the sheer drag of having to go to the town, village or church hall or school to exercise your rights seems unnecessary. Perhaps then a vast apathy sets in at the seemingly huge vagueness of it all. This time there will be no debate about the standard of living but rather but rather standards we choose to live by Maybe you accept the official panicky newspaper and political establishment line that its all a nonsense, a hopelessly quixotic or principled or opportunistic waste of time.That would be a terrible mistake.
I will argue that this time you must come out in more numbers than ever because this time the issue is more vital than even our immediate food bills. This time uniquely you are being asked to decide about what kind of people we are and what kind of country we wish to live in. You’re being asked to vote about us and you may never get to vote on something so profoundly fundamental again.
Famous defenders of liberty have walked the streets of Hull before and many fine words have been spoken in this very room so…
Let us be grand for once then, for we talk of great subjects. Let us ask ‘what is the point of England “ now that Parliament, whose primary purpose is to defend the liberties of the people haveso gratuitously, so wantonly, so casually betrayed that trust and taken from us that same liberty which above all else defines this country and its constitution, and that which has been its greatest gift to the world its freedom, its tolerances, its civilisation which William Wilberforce so forcefully argued from this town so many centuries ago.Melville claimed for America “that it bears the Ark of the liberties of the world.” It could be better said of that Britain which invented and codified those freedoms.
Are Magna Carta, and Habeas Corpus not to mention the Anti-Slavery laws, to be traducedin one brief sad moment of political expediency. When a 800 years ago Britons told the state in words that still ring true and through the ages
“To no man will we deny, To no man will we delay, Justice and Right”
42 days detention denies and delays Justice and Right. It is a clear breach ofancient right, of Magna Carta itself.
So what great existential threat does this country now face that did not face our forefathers of the past 1000 years. What is so grave the emergency now that neither civil war nor world war nor various terrorisms were considered so dangerous to our security that our oldest statutes -and few have lasted the 400 years relevance of habeas corpus - could be upended for such a ha’pnworth of momentary contemporary panic. If authority is to be respected it must be just. When it is not, then the greatest threat to that authority is its own instinct to authoritarianism.
These new security measures, these new limitations on our liberties are not the thin end of the wedge We’re way past that now. This is now, already, the bulkier mid way point of that authoritarian block. For we have in the past few years so mauled our ancient defended rights, rights for which bloody battles were fought and heroes lived and died for, as to seriously consider whether the constitution is today much more than a cartoon of its essential meaning. And what moral authority resides any longer in a lawmaking body that acts against the liberties of its own people? Is it not true that the willingness to use intolerable means to achieve impossible ends shows the political mind at its most deluded?
Meanwhile our supine press gulled by political complicity, lull the population to apathy by banging on with their trivial irrelevancies while the constitution is quietly turned aside. Shame on them. Alas they are shameless.
What terrorizes the terrorists is our civilization. What those unthinking fools of fundamentalism fear most are the very freedoms our representatives strip from us. Essentially this ‘war on terror’is a conflict waged against Islamist forces that claim to reject the Enlightenment. If that is so, then how can we ever succeed if we side with our opponents in rejecting those same ideals? Every moment we are spied on by the invisible watchers. Every time that we are recorded and monitored at every turn, on every purchase. Every time we are mandatorially logged, noted, tagged and followed on databanks and files because “it is in our best interest” They win. And every time we accept it, we lose. We must not hold this attitude of passive acceptance to these restraints on justice, rights and liberties that ultimately amounts to nothing more than complicity with intolerance.
Why should I carry an ID card? I own my identity – not them.Why should I have to identify myself to the state? How dare they demand I identify myself? To whom am I identifying myself and for what? Spain, France and Germany have had identity cards for decades and have more or less the same levels of crime as us. So why insist on them. The war on terror is no answer. Indeed there will soon be a brisk business in false British cards and more seriously they didn’t stop the bombers in Germany or Spain.
It is of course almost comically Orwellian to trot out that comprehensively stupid, complacent and absurd excuse of the natural authoritarianThe classic“Only the guilty need be afraid” line. And how sickening to hear it in England. “Only the guilty need be afraid”. Really? This repulsive expression beloved of tabloid and home secretary alike has at least got the virtue that it is demonstrably false.
Shall we say it to the innocent men of Forest Gate, already shot then banged up and subsequently released without charge.
Shall we say it to the demonstrators going about their legally permitted democratic business who are roughed up, abused and put away.
Say it to me that when you are lifted from the street, incarcerated for 42 days without knowing why, while your boss considers his and your position, your family cower in fear and dismay and your friends and community shun you.
Tell them that when you are released, as innocent as when you went in and try vainly to return to the life stripped from you.
Tell that to the Gestapo-like anonymous, faceless accuser whom you well never have to encounter or challenge.
Tell that to the
judge, for that other ancient right of been judged by your peers in jury is gradually removed
No ladies and gentlemen in this world of spies, snitches, cameras, files and databanks the state knows all our sad, shameful little private secrets. Like threatening gangsters they know who we are and they know where we live. Not Big Brother, this is Big Britain. It is not simply about the big issues. This is also about the liberty of the ordinary person to have an ordinary life and not feel oppressed- the everyday small liberties that affect us all. When RIPA, the law that allowscouncils to authorise surveillance and to get hold of your phone records, e-mails and website usage was enacted 8 years ago, 9 organisations including the police, security and revenue services were allowed to use it.Today there are 786 more agencies added -including all local authorities, police forces and bodies, the Financial Services Authority and the Ambulance service.In 2006 these bodies made 1000 applications A DAY to use these powers! They will say “If you don’t do anything wrong why worry?” Rather you should worry precisely because you do nothing wrong. They must have no right to spy on your ability to live a good life. And when we finally become afraid to say what we think, it is one step nearer to that most awful condition of all – being afraid of what TO think!. “Only the guilty need be afraid” Afraid not.In this world it is only the innocent need be afraid. For the state has assumed our guilt already. We have all become suspects. We have become guilty till proven innocent.
What lies behind all of this, this perversion of the British idea?
From 2000 to today, incarceration without charge and without recourse to justice has gone from 5 days to 7 to 28 to 42. Foreigners may be imprisoned indefinitely on national sercurity grounds. Detention is based on secret intelligence and suspicion. There is no criminal charge and no trial. Our very own Guantanamo.Terrorism stop and search powers are used widely and routinely including against that elderly man who had the temerity to heckle Jack Straw. Local councils snoop and spy and threaten old people and others over litter and wheelie bins. Why? It is true that most people want security rather than liberty. But then as that unlikely sage Dick Cheney (and he should know) said “It is easy to take Liberty for granted when you have never had it taken from you”.
It is our complacency that let’s them get away with it. It is our apathy that we must fear.
But are we really so threatened in the UK, that we must uniquely introduce the most swingeing and illiberal precautions.
The United States, which unlike us, genuinely feels itself at war, under siege and attackhas an absolute limit of 2 days before detainess are brought before a judge and that judge being presented with evidence. Last week the supreme court held the government to be in contempt for suspending the rights of the Guantanamo. residents to fair justice.
In Ireland even at the height of the IRA terror campaign the limit was 7 days
Australia only 60 miles from the most populous Muslim nation and the victim of its own bomb horrors has a maximum of 12 days.
Spain with its huge north African Muslim population and the victim of the worst European bombing outrage is 5 days maximum. Yet all the bombers were cught and tried or killed themselves.
Italy with its 1970’s red brigade terror and its large African population has a maximum of 4 days.
Germany with its giant millions strong Turkish population and during its murderous Baader Meinhof rampage has 2 days.
Russia with its Islamic Chechnyan rebels, its war and outrages has 5 days maximum.
It goes on. What is wrong with us. Have we lost our confidence, our stoicism, our bravery and dignity, sang-froid and upper lip. No, I don’t think so, not if the great awful dignity of the victims families are anything to go by. Or the magnificent and traditional response of the capitol with that very British attribute of “getting on with it’. Not us then. Is Parliament afraid? Apparently not. MI5? They say not. So why imprison people on suspicion, without charge, without evidence or trial for 42 days? How very, very unBritish.
Let me be clear. I am not complacent by the threat or the scale of it facing us. But the government has presented no case that is even remotely convincing for the consequent and growing loss of civil liberty. As Burke said ‘The people never give up their liberty but under some delusion” These measures are simply political and designed to make the government seem strong on terrorism and the opposition weak. But even their most senior members have spoken out against this law. The Home Affairs committee came out against the proposal in December. The former Attorney General and the former Lord Chancellor are against it. John Major is against it. Even Jacqui Smith has had to admit that MI bloody5 didn’t ask for it!
Detention without trial is constitutionally repulsive. It is almost an oxymoron. A legal illegality. A form of legal bullying. It is to view justice through the wrong end of the telescope. It is portrayed as a necessary weapon in the states anti-terror armoury but in what new capacity? Perhaps they believe it has some merit in being an ill-conceived, criminally stupid and clumsily inept attempt to cow or scare the fantastically deluded and unreasonable who are therefore, by definition, incapable of that sort of fear anyway. If you are intent on blowing yourself up, a spell at her majesty’s pleasure probably constitutes an irritating delay in the inevitable, rather than a panicked repudiation of jihadist ambition.
What it most definitely is however is counterproductive. Because it is unjust the law simply becomes more grist to the terrorist mill. Indeed it becomes their success, for they have succeeded in taking from us part of the veryfreedom they so despise. Add to that the rather alarming fact that the experts have already told us these measures can never prevent another 9/11, 7/11, Spanish train or Bali disco bombing. If anything it will simply fuel the flames of resentment.
What the terrorists are bewildered by and truly frightened of is the very thing this law rejects – reason, values, logic, liberty and law that enshrines, encapsulates and articulates our freedom. That is the Britishness that John Major, Gordon Brown and others find so hard to define. It is the coherent idea thatconstitutes itself into an inchoate feeling and sense of pride in place. It is what that great defender of Justice Rumpole of the Bailey called the Golden Thread that runs through British justice.This war on terror is a conflict waged against Islamist forces that claim to reject the Enlightenment. If that is so then how can we ever succeed if we side with our opponents in rejecting those same ideals.
Let us be clear then. This is not security we are being offered, this is government demanding freedom from the constraints that have developed over many centuries to curb the exercise of power. This is a type of illiberal democracy where elections take place against a background of diminished freedom. Ben Franklin said that “they who can give up liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety”.
I was told that David Davis was out on a limb on this one. Shamefully that is true. But it is the right limb to be out on. And it is a limb I am proud to join him on. It is also the limb that William Wilberforce climbed out and perched himself upon in this very town.When I think of this area therefore I think of this mans and this areas struggle against injustice, the rights of the unlawfully chained and those denied their liberty. This is not the grotesquerie of slavery and it would be wrong to conflate the two. But it is about justice, it is about liberty, it is about your rights. It is about Magna Carta, and what Britain is, was and must continue to be.It is against the whole flabby, conforming, brainwashed, gullible, witless crap of it all.
This is the only place that uniquely in this election has been given the chance and honour to speak out again for all of us. To speak out on behalf of justice versus intolerance. To whistleblow. To firewatch against unthinking power .To speak about an idea of right and liberty under the law. To vote for an idea of life itself.THE idea of Britain. Tory, Lib Dem, Labour who cares- clamber out on this limb with us, for its where we all belong. Turn out hugely and thank God that you are in a country that is still free to do so.
Ladies and Gentlemen. Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
The Mirror - Geldof Backs Tory Davis in Poll Battle
By David Davis Published: Friday, 04 July 08 - 11:01 AM (GMT) Last Updated: Friday, 04 July 08 - 11:05 AM (GMT)
BOB Geldof is backing Tory David Davis in his by-election campaign against erosion of civil liberties. He will speak at a rally in Hull as the former Shadow Home Secretary, who quit over holding terror suspects without charge, fights to regain his Haltemprice and Howden seat. Geldof said last night: "What is the point of Britain without its freedoms? What terrorises the terrorists is our civilisation." Mr Davis said: "I am delighted Bob Geldof is supporting our campaign, which is vital to the freedom of our country."
Published in The Mirror (Star Edition) July 4th 2008
The Independent - Bob Geldof to back David Davis
By David Davis Published: Friday, 04 July 08 - 11:00 AM (GMT) Last Updated: Friday, 04 July 08 - 11:03 AM (GMT)
Bob Geldof is to endorse David Davis's protest against the Government's erosion of civil liberties. Geldof is a close ally of Gordon Brown on tackling poverty and repression in Africa, but he will join the former Tory frontbencher on the campaign trail in the Haltemprice and Howden by- election. He said: "What is the point of Britain without its freedoms? What terrorises the terrorists is our civilisation."
Published in The Independent Friday July 4th 2008
Birmingham Post - Brown ally Geldof to support Davis election
By David Davis Published: Friday, 04 July 08 - 10:58 AM (GMT)
Bob Geldof is to endorse former Tory frontbencher David Davis' protest against the Government's erosion of civil liberties, it was revealed last night. The rock star - a close ally of Gordon Brown on tackling poverty and repression in Africa - will join Mr Davis on the campaign trail. He said: "What is the point of Britain without its freedoms? What terrorises the terrorists is our civilisation. I am delighted to support this campaign and I will be speaking on it in Hull tomorrow." The backing, from someone he so regularly shares a platform with on development issues, could prove embarrassing for the Prime Minister. Mr Davis quit as MP for Haltemprice and Howden last month so he could fight a by-election on the issue, accusing the Government of "trampling" on essential freedoms. However, Labour has refused to field a candidate, and ministers have been doing their best to ignore the contest, which culminates on July 10.
Published in Birmingham Post Friday July 4th 2008
Brown's security strategy is the worst of all worlds
By David Davis Published: Friday, 04 July 08 - 10:42 AM (GMT)
As shadow home secretary for five years, it became an office joke that, faced with difficult policy questions, I would demand ‘get me the evidence!’ I am a scientist by training and, while 69 per cent of the public believe I took a principled stance in resigning from Parliament, that decision was also based on a rigorous empirical assessment of the evidence. The reality is that the relentless stream of repressive measures taken by this government over the last eleven years — whether 42 days pre-charge detention or any other — has not made us any safer. In many cases, they have jeopardised our security. In other cases, they are an irrelevant distraction — of time, resources and energy — from the real job at hand, namely protecting the public.
Terrified of the electorate, Gordon Brown decided that Labour would not contest the by-election occasioned by my resignation, even gagging ministers from debating the government’s record. Yet he could not resist responding to my resignation in a speech he gave on 17 June in the cosy confines of his favourite think-tank. That speech made two things crystal clear. First, he stands behind the sustained assault on British liberty, so expect more to come. Second, he has no idea about the effectiveness of his security policies.
Take 42 days. Mr Brown said it was difficult to claim that the change in the terrorist threat was not ‘serious enough to justify change in our laws’. Yet he offered no evidence to justify yet another extension — the limit quadrupled between 2003 and 2005 — which explains why the Director of Public Prosecutions concluded that the 42 days proposal was ‘unnecessary’ and ‘irrelevant’. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner conceded there was no evidence. Others who support 42 days, like Ken Jones (president of ACPO, the Association of Chief Police Officers), quietly confessed they had not scrutinised the evidence. Nor had ministers. Jacqui Smith pointed to the alleged Heathrow 2006 plot to blow ten airliners out of the sky. Five cases had gone to 28 days, so surely Ken Jones was right to say police were ‘up against the buffers’? In fact, the evidence showed that all the main players in the conspiracy were charged within 21 days. Of the five held for 28 days, three were innocent (released without any further suspicion). The other two were charged with less serious offences based on evidence obtained after 4 and 12 days, not up against the wire. They were both subsequently bailed — hardly high risk cases. So, the DPP was right. They had coped ‘comfortably’ within the 28-day limit.
If 42 days is unnecessary, it will also jeopardise security. Colonel Tim Collins, the hero from Iraq who has fought terrorists from the IRA to Al-Qa’eda, is the latest to warn that 42 days is a draconian response that plays straight into the hands of the terrorists. It will also harm intelligence. The government’s own impact assessment points out that 42 days risks cutting off local community intelligence. Mr Brown lectures that 42 days ‘ensures both our tradition of liberty and our need for security’. But the evidence roundly refutes him on both counts.
Next up, ID cards. Mr Brown claimed that biometric technology offers ‘one of the best examples of how we can confront the modern criminal while respecting liberties’. Experts say just the reverse. By clustering masses of personal data on one vulnerable database, ID cards create what Microsoft’s national technology officer calls a ‘honeypot’ for hackers and terrorists — not least since the biometric technology can be cloned with a gadget costing £100.
On to the DNA database, which Mr Brown rambunctiously claims has ‘revolutionised the way the police protect the public’. Bit odd, given that less than 0.4 per cent of crimes are detected using DNA. He added that, if the database had not been widened to retain 1 million innocent people’s DNA, criminals guilty of 114 murders and 116 rapes ‘would in all probability have got away’. This is just nonsense. But don’t take my word for it. GeneWatch, an independent not-for-profit organisation, roundly rubbished Mr Brown’s figures as deliberately misleading (the ten-page rebuttal is available at www.genewatch.org). For the record, I have never proposed the abolition of the database. I just think it would better serve law enforcement and personal privacy if Mr Brown replaced the 1 million innocent people currently on the database with the many thousand serious criminals he has left off.
Next, CCTV. Mr Brown made fewer claims, which is not surprising since Home Office reports say that 80 per cent of CCTV footage is unusable. Instead, he issued a party briefing entitled ‘Challenge the Tories on CCTV’, calling on Labour minions to spread the lie that I am ‘in opposition to CCTV cameras’. In the document Tony McNulty, the Home Office minister of state for security, says, ‘CCTV is a powerful crime-fighting tool... CCTV makes our streets safer.’ He clearly has not read the Home Office’s 2005 evaluation report, which found that CCTV ‘had little overall effect on crime levels’ — cutting crime in only 7 per cent of deployments. CCTV ‘played no part in reducing fear of crime’ and ‘public support for CCTV decreased after implementation by as much as 20 per cent’. I am not opposed to CCTV. But I have consistently called for more effective deployment, coupled with stronger sanctions for abuse of innocent people’s privacy.
Then there is surveillance. At this point, Mr Brown has run out of bogus statistics. The fact is there are 1,000 bugging operations in Britain every day. Councils bug local residents, but there is still a ban on using intercept evidence to prosecute terrorists. Neighbourhood spies follow our children home from school, and investigate a range of trivial misdemeanours. Is that really how we want our soaring council tax rates spent? Wouldn’t precious local resources be better spent on putting more police on the street, given the doubling of violent crime and rising anti-social behaviour?
Finally, there is the attack on free speech. On the one hand, we have seen the arrest or prosecution of peaceful protesters — like Walter Wolfgang or the anti-war protesters reciting the names of Iraq war dead outside the cenotaph in Whitehall. On the other, Abu Hamza and the Danish cartoon protesters are left to preach hatred and incite violence on our streets — driving the growing radicalisation of young British Muslims that is now thrown back as a justification for 42 days.
Mr Brown’s security strategy is the worst of all worlds — draconian, expensive and ineffective. This contortion of British security and liberty is the result of pervasive ministerial amateurism, driven by a desperate thirst for headlines. Policy-making for the news cycle cannot be properly assessed, checked and tested. That is why I am fighting this by-election. We need a national debate on the erosion of British liberty in the name of security — based on a thorough, rigorous and critical assessment of all the evidence, not a stream of simplistic soundbites.
By David Davis Published: Friday, 04 July 08 - 09:39 AM (GMT) Last Updated: Friday, 04 July 08 - 10:23 AM (GMT)
THE exigencies of the war on terror seem a long way from Haltemprice and Howden, one of the more bucolic parliamentary constituencies. There are few obvious targets to strike in this collection of Yorkshire villages, nor much scope for a clash of cultures (the non-white population is under 2%). Islamist recruiters hoping to exploit deprivation should also look elsewhere: five years ago the private-wealth division of Barclays, a bank, rated it the tenth-richest place in the country, once living costs were taken into account.
Yet thanks to its MP, David Davis, the seat has become a forum for the vexed debate on the trade-off between liberty and security that has gripped Westminster. On June 12th, the day after Parliament voted to extend maximum detention without charge for terrorist suspects from 28 to 42 days, Mr Davis resigned as the Conservative home-affairs spokesman and announced that he would quit his seat. He said he would campaign in the resulting by-election, which takes place on July 10th, on the issue of defending civil liberties from 42 days, identity cards, CCTV cameras, DNA databases and other incursions.
It was a quixotic gesture—for Mr Davis’s party had backed his desire to oppose 42 days, after all—but those hoping for his campaign to flop completely are being disappointed. True, neither Labour nor the Liberal Democrats have put up candidates, so Mr Davis (whose rivals include a member of the Church of the Militant Elvis Party) cannot claim much of a mandate for civil libertarianism if, as expected, he wins. But his resignation has prompted a response from the government: Gordon Brown, the prime minister, gave a speech on liberty and security five days afterwards, and has more recently exchanged tetchy letters with Mr Davis.
As for the Tories, some senior figures deplored Mr Davis’s “self indulgence” and fretted that the loss of one of their big-hitters would create the party’s first bad-news story for months. The party has suffered no dip in the polls, however. Others speculate that Mr Davis is trying to undermine David Cameron (who defeated him for the Tory leadership in 2005), and could be a thorn in his side from the backbenches. But the candidate has ruled out ever leading his party; Mr Cameron campaigned for him on July 2nd and may yet bring him back into the shadow cabinet.
There is, however, a criticism that is harder for Mr Davis to rebut—that he would have served the liberal cause better by sticking around to be home secretary in the next Tory government. Repealing 42 days, to which the Tories (with a caveat or two) are committed, would be an obvious early move. He insists graciously that this could be done just as well by Dominic Grieve, his replacement, but some doubt that. Civil liberties is a tricky issue for the Conservatives, who have both a libertarian wing and an authoritarian one. On the “Nixon in China” principle, Mr Davis’s background (he grew up on a council estate and is no bleeding heart on crime) gives him the cover to take an enlightened line on civil liberties; Mr Grieve, a privately-schooled QC, lacks this advantage.
Instead, Mr Davis envisages his role after the by-election as that of one-man pressure group. Public opinion can seem an insurmountable barrier for civil libertarians (there was a clear majority in favour of 42 days). But Mr Davis notes that popular support for ID cards has slipped as voters have been made aware of their drawbacks. “Maybe something similar can be achieved on detention without charge,” he says, brandishing letters of support from the likes of Tim Collins, once an army colonel, and Terry Waite, a former hostage.
If Mr Davis sounds as if he is in this for the long haul, it is because he fears that the threat to Britain’s liberties comes from gradual erosion over time rather than a frenzied assault by a particular government. “Drop a frog into boiling water and it will jump straight out,” says Mr Davis. “Put it into lukewarm water, slowly turn up the heat, and it will die.”
By David Davis Published: Thursday, 03 July 08 - 08:26 PM (GMT)
Leading anti-poverty campaigner and former Boomtown Rat Sir Bob Geldof will join David Davis in Hull on Friday, 4th July. Sir Bob will back David's stance on civil liberties.
Speaking in support of David, Sir Bob said: "What is the point of Britain without its freedoms? What terrorises the terrorists is our civilisation? I am delighted to support this campaign and I will be speaking on it in Hull tomorrow".
David responded: "I am delighted that Bob Geldof is supporting our campaign, which stretches across all parties and is vital to the freedom of our country".
You Ask The Questions
By David Davis Published: Sunday, 29 June 08 - 10:13 PM (GMT)
You’ll be running against the monster raving loonies and a fruit seller. Hasn’t the gamble failed? Liz Cromfield, Sheffield
It speaks volumes that Gordon Brown will not defend his record by contesting this election. But my aim is to launch a national debate on the defence of British liberty - and that is bigger than any one politician. I will spend the next three weeks making the case against ID cards, 42 days and the increasingly intrusive surveillance society -and for habeas corpus, free speech and the right to trial by jury. I am willing debate anyone, any time, anywhere. There is wide cross-party support for what I am trying to achieve - not to mention overwhelming support from outside the world of politics. Mr Brown has gagged all Ministers from participating in any televised debates. He's terrified of the electorate and he's terrified of the debate. He is right, at least, on that.
Isn’t it laughable that you are framing yourself as a fighter for liberty when you are an impassioned supporter of the death penalty? Sanj Taylor, Leeds
I do not campaign to restore the death penalty. ( Actually I have never even made a speech on the subject, but it seems to fascinate interviewers.)
But it is my personal, moral, opinion that in the most serious multiple murder cases, where the evidence is overwhelming (not just beyond reasonable doubt), it is justifiable. I think there ought to be room for different views on ethical questions like that.
Why is a personal vanity crusade was more important than constructive team playing inside the Conservative Party? John Frizell, by email
I don't agree that standing up for the principles I believe in is vanity. And the Conservatives have jumped 2 points in the polls since I resigned, so it is not damaging the Party.
Tell us the truth – did you have a blazing row with David Cameron? Carlos T, Manchester
No. The papers just made that up. We are still friends and he is coming up to campaign for me in the next few weeks.
Isn't this all just driven by your monstrous ego and jealousy that David Cameron stuffed you in the leadership contest? Bernard Morris, by email
I've dealt with the vanity point, and ruled out standing as leader. It is a rather sad sign of the times that there is such shock that anyone in politics would give up their job for what they believe in.
Mr Davis, you’ve restored my faith in politics. When are you running for leader? Sue Enderle, Dagenham, London
Thank you for the moral support - but I have ruled out ever standing for the leadership again.
Have you at any moment regretted your decision since it happened? Carl Thompson, Brighton
Not even for a second. I have never felt more sure of a principle in my life.
How did you feel about all those toffs taking over the Conservative Party again? Paul Thompson, Manchester
I could not care less about things like that. I dislike inverse snobbery as much as the conventional kind. Anyway I have a toff on my campaign, Tony Benn (see below).
Did you ever imagine you’d see the day when you were battling on the same side as Tony Benn? Dan Harrison, Exeter
Yes, I have always had friends from across the political divides. Tony Benn and I are old friends. I admire his courage, even if we disagree on many things.
Were you offended by Andy Burnham’s comments about you and Shami Chakrabarti? David Fletch, by email
I think it is pretty pathetic that Mr Burnham will not take up my challenge for a debate on the government's record, but is all too willing to issue personal smears. He is gutless on both counts.
How come you style yourself as a defender of freedom when you supported homophobic legislation? Ken McEwen, by email
I may have voted against certain legislation, but that does not make me homophobic. For example, I am in favour of allowing Christian adoption agencies to be exempt from discrimination laws, because they do a great job and - out of religious conviction - believe children should have a mother and a father. People with different views ought to be able to freely debate this kind of controversial moral issue without being accused of bigotry. And see Iain Dale’s blog for a brief account of my defence of gay people on many occasions.
You supported 28 days detention but opposed 42 days. So how many days’ detention should we have (and please don't duck the question)? Frances Butler, Stourbridge
We should only be keeping someone in jail without telling them what they are charged with for as shorter period as is necessary, bearing in mind the need to protect the public. Detention without charge is a necessary evil - it must be strictly limited. The current evidence from police and prosecutors experience in conducting investigations shows that 21 days has proved necessary in practice. A 28 day limit was agreed in 2005 for the most exceptional situations and I think it is still justifiable, but not a day more.
We certainly must resist the political pressure to keep on increasing the maximum period. Remember, the maximum detention period quadrupled between 2003 and 2005 - from 7 to 28 days. It is tempting for the government to play the numbers game - asking for 42, 56, 70, 90 days - because it is a way of talking tough on terror. But that is something we must check, or we will continue to see our freedoms salami-sliced away.
Finally, we can equip the police with greater tools to get better investigative use out of the current 28 day limit, which would ease the time pressures they face. For years, I have been calling for the use of post-charge questioning and intercept evidence in terrorism cases. These are not silver bullet solutions, but they would significantly boost our law enforcement capability and take some pressure off the police. Once we have introduced intercept evidence and post-charge questioning, and developed the use of plea-bargaining, it may be possible to reduce the limit below 28 days, without any risk to our security. That will depend on the evidence available from our law enforcement agencies - but it is something we should strive for.
Isn’t this just a stunt to raise your profile? Neil Frei, by email
That is what Ministers say. But I don't think this government can accuse me of stunts, after the farce of its rigged vote on 42 days. And the public don't see it as a stunt – 69% think I am taking a principled stand.
What's wrong with CCTV cameras, unless you're committing crimes? They've made my estate safer. Paul Moore, Clapham
CCTV has its place. But the current approach is the worst of all worlds – intrusive, ineffective and enormously expensive. The government spent half a billion pounds on CCTV – more cameras than any other country, one for every fourteen citizens. But police say 80% of CCTV footage is of poor quality, particularly for identifying criminals. CCTV is also prone to abuse. In one case, a camera was pointed at a young woman undressing and displayed by operators on a plasma screen at the control centre. We need a focused use of CCTV that works and better controls and sanctions to protect individual privacy. There are cases where CCTV has helped, but many where it has failed. For example, after the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in July 2005, there was no usable footage from any of the CCTV cameras - on the bus, tube or at Stockwell station.
I am enormously impressed by your actions, But what do you propose to do after your campaign in Haltemprice & Howden to address the shortcomings in Parliamentary procedure? Seb Thirlway, by email
I will continue to campaign to defend our fundamental freedoms. The best way to reinvigorate our democracy would be a change in government at the ballot box – and I will be working whole-heartedly towards that goal!
Ever think about joining the Lib Dems? Lucy Flint, Barnet
Never.
What did you do when you were in the TAs? Tom Manley, Kent
I am not sure that I can tell you anything interesting, but let me squash a few common misconceptions. Firstly I was a soldier not an officer, contrary to what many papers report. Secondly, although it had its moments, it was much more brutally hard work and much less glamorous adventure than I suspect many people think.
Do you wish we had more referendums in this country? Michelle Owana, by email
I think there is a case for referendums on big constitutional issues that affect the fundamental direction of the country. The EU Constitutional Treaty is the most obvious recent example.
Who is your political hero? Lauren Edwards, by email
I have huge admiration for William Wilberforce. He held my seat in Parliament and was one of the great champions of freedom during the nineteenth century, leading the campaign to abolish the slave trade. He never gave up, no matter what the odds or the personal costs.
Apart from sharing the same constituency, do you and Alan B'stard share any similarities? Dave Duncan, by email
By David Davis Published: Sunday, 29 June 08 - 07:55 PM (GMT)
Dear Sir
You suggest (‘Mary Poppins and the Magna Carta’, 21 June) that the public support liberty in abstract, but that their ‘resolve wilts …. when specific security gains are promised’.
In fact, it depends on what you ask. Your poll assumes that ‘CCTV cameras help to deter criminal behaviour’ – overlooking police reports showing that 80% of CCTV footage cannot be used. You say that ‘police are relying ever more heavily on DNA to solve crimes’, yet the percentage of crimes detected using DNA has remained below 0.4% - despite 1million innocent citizens being swabbed since 2002. And your suggestion that ID cards will make ‘keeping track of terrorists … easier’ overlooks the fact that ID cards did not stop the 9/11 bombers based in Germany, or the terrorist attacks on Madrid and Istanbul.
It is claimed that 42 days is popular, yet another YouGov poll found that 70% would prefer to keep the 28 day limit, if police were allowed to use post-charge questioning.
The government presents these issues as Faustian trade-offs between security and liberty. The reality is that draconian measures rarely make us safer, and often jeopardise security. That is not a trade-off. It is a con, which is why we need an informed national debate that goes to the heart of our liberal democracy.
Last week Gordon Brown bribed and bullied MPs into voting to extend the power to imprison people without charge from 28 to 42 days. He failed to provide a shred of evidence that it was necessary to fight terrorism, and brushed aside security warnings that it may prove counter-productive.
For now, the tactic has worked. But he paid a heavy price. His Parliamentary authority is in tatters, having failed to hold together a Labour majority. And his moral authority is in the gutter after the shabby deals it took to get the vote through.
I resigned on principle and I am delighted that, as well as support from David Cameron (despite what you might read in some of the papers), Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs have also come out in support of my stance. I am standing against the accumulation - and abuse - of power by the state, at the expense of the fundamental freedoms of the citizen.
Nothing, however, prepared me for the scale of the response from the public. It has been truly humbling, a world apart from the some of the carping around the Westminster village. I have been inundated with thousands of messages of support. A survey in my constituency defied the pollsters, who say the public don't care about liberty and privacy - with 69 per cent supporting my decision.
Many of those who contacted me say they are traditional Labour supporters, disillusioned that Mr Brown - and his government - have presided over the relentless erosion of our freedoms. This week I am setting up a website to kickstart a popular debate on these important issues.
Government ministers have dismissed my campaign as a stunt. That is a bit rich, given the farcical vote on 42 days. Kelvin MacKenzie claims the by-election is a waste of taxpayers' money. But he overlooks the Big Brother state's expensive tastes - like the £19billion wasted on ID cards. The bloated state has abused its power, but also burnt a hole in the taxpayer's pocket. A national debate is long overdue.
"One of the great values of being a British citizen," Baroness Kennedy wrote at the weekend, "is the strong sense that we are not here at the behest of the state; the state is here at our behest." I could not agree more. But under this government, that equation has been reversed.
As citizens, we have become subject to ever greater monitoring, surveillance and intrusion. Yesterday Andy Burnham, the Culture Secretary, said he was "staggered" by my criticisms of CCTV, claiming it is vital for fighting crime and counter-terrorism. I am not against all CCTV. But the current approach is just daft. This Government has spent about half a billion pounds on CCTV - we have more cameras than any other country in the world, one for every 14 citizens. Yet the police say 80 per cent of CCTV footage is of poor quality, particularly for identifying criminals. Mr Burnham mentioned the role of CCTV in identifying the 21/7 bombers. But after the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes there was no usable footage from any of the CCTV cameras on the bus, Tube or at Stockwell station.
If Mr Burnham really wants to defend his Government's record in creating a surveillance society, I challenge him to come to Yorkshire and debate it before the voters. But I won't hold my breath. It is easier to snipe from the sidelines.
Mr Brown has barred the local candidate from running - not least because he agrees with my position on 42 days, along with many Labour MPs. The truth is that Mr Brown is a bottler who fears the will of the people.
He bottled the General Election when it looked like he could not beat David Cameron. He bottled a referendum on the EU constitution, because he feared he would not win it. Now he is bottling this by-election in Haltemprice and Howden - one place you certainly cannot buy off the voters.
No matter. It is clear from the support I have received from across the political spectrum, and more importantly the country at large, that this is a national debate we can - and must - have.
Yesterday, I announced my intention to resign from the House of Commons, which I have served as an MP for 21 years, and also as shadow home secretary, a position I have held for almost five years, in order to fight a by-election in my constituency of Haltemprice and Howden. Why?
On Wednesday, we witnessed a severe blow to liberal democracy in this country. On the one hand, Gordon Brown extended the maximum period of pre-charge detention to 42 days, sacrificing one of the most fundamental freedoms of every British citizen - the right not to be held in prolonged police detention without being told the charges against you. He sacrificed a fundamental liberty without a shred of evidence that it was necessary. And he did so against the advice of many security experts who warned that it may fuel the very extremism we are trying to defeat.
On the other hand, in pawning off one of the crown jewels of our democracy, the Prime Minister stooped to the lowest level, with widespread reports that he threatened and bought off just enough voices of dissent within his own party to sneak this measure through. Despite the frenetic excitement around Westminster, this was a sad day for the mother of parliaments.
We already had the longest period of detention without charge in the free world. Now it has been further increased - by half - just as we approach the anniversary of the Magna Carta, which has guaranteed the freedom of the individual from arbitrary detention for nearly 800 years. David Cameron will continue to lead our steadfast opposition to 42 days - which will now continue in the Lords - and I look forward to campaigning with him in Haltemprice and Howden. But this week we crossed a line. And I feel duty bound to take a personal stand to resist this sustained assault on the fundamental freedoms that millions in this country died defending.
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For one thing, having secured 42 days based on the most generic of security arguments - technology, complexity, unpredictability - this Government will be tempted by the politics of terror to keep coming back for 56, then 70, then 90 days. That is why I believe we must draw a line now.
We will soon have the most intrusive ID card system in the world. There is a CCTV camera for every 14 citizens - despite growing evidence of their ineffectiveness as deployed. We have the largest DNA database in the world, larger than any dictatorship, with thousands of innocent children and millions of innocent citizens on it.
The Government has attacked the jury system, that historic bulwark against unfair law and the arbitrary abuse of state power. Shortcuts with our legal system have left British justice less firm and less fair. The Government hoards masses of personal data on insecure databases, opening up our private lives to the prying eyes of official snoopers, but also exposing personal data to careless civil servants and criminal hackers.
The state has security powers that clamp down on peaceful protest, and so-called hate laws that stifle legitimate debate - while those inciting violence get off scot-free. A 15-year-old boy was recently charged on the spot for holding a banner describing scientology as a "dangerous cult", but extremists such as Abu Hamza are left free for years to incite violence and vitriol against this country.
There are now 266 state powers allowing officials to force their way into the home. Six hundred public bodies have the authority to bug phones and emails and intercept the post. Forget the security services: councils and quangos conduct 1,000 surveillance operations every month, using powers that ought to be the preserve of law enforcement agencies. Officials in Poole spied for weeks on a family taking their children to school, to check that they lived inside the catchment area. Even our rubbish can now be examined by neighbourhood spooks.
None of this has made us any safer. Violent crime has doubled in 10 years, and the Government continually briefs blood-curdling assessments of the terrorist threat. It is a myth to believe that we can defend our security by sacrificing our fundamental freedoms - one I intend to puncture over the next few weeks.
I am fighting this by-election as the Conservative candidate, but on vital national issues that transcend party politics. I hope to attract support from across the political spectrum, and the country at large. I look forward to taking on those who say the British public do not care about liberty - this campaign will be about leading a national debate, not pandering to polls. At stake is my own career as a Member of Parliament, but more fundamentally a long overdue debate on the preservation of liberty in this great country.
There will be those that cast aspersions on this endeavour, and those who try to suggest divisions within the Conservative Party. Yesterday, Westminster was foaming with speculation about a rift between me and David Cameron. It is nonsense. We have been united from start to finish on 42 days and wider security policy. We agreed that a Conservative government would immediately repeal 42 days, in the absence of the most compelling new evidence. And I am fully committed to David Cameron's fine leadership of the Conservative Party, including the excellent appointment of Dominic Grieve, one of my closest friends, as shadow home secretary.
So, as I return to Haltemprice and Howden, I lay down this challenge to Gordon Brown and his Government. Labour must put up a candidate to debate and defend their draconian track record. Anything else would demonstrate supreme political cowardice and contempt for public opinion.
I challenge the Prime Minister and any other member of his Cabinet with the courage of their convictions. I will debate with any one of them - any time, anywhere - what Gordon Brown euphemistically referred to as the "next chapter of British liberty".
By David Davis Published: Friday, 27 June 08 - 03:45 PM (GMT)
Colonel Tim Collins, former soldier, who has fought terrorists from the IRA to Iraq said in support of David Davis’s campaign:
“I admire David for taking this principled stand. My first hand experience of dealing with terrorism tells me that the battle for hearts and minds must be at the forefront of any counter terrorism strategy. We have got to be tough on terror, but more importantly we have got to be smart: and avoid counter-productive tactics that help do the terrorists’ job for them.
Colonel Collins added: “It is a sad reflection on our democracy that Gordon Brown is not prepared to put up a candidate with such vital issues at stake”.
David Davis welcomed the backing of Colonel Collins, saying:
"Draconian measures like 42 days pre-charge detention will make us less, not more, safe. No-one has more experience of fighting terror than Colonel Collins. He joins a long list of security experts - including the former head of MI5 and senior police officers - who warn that we cannot defend our security by sacrificing our freedoms."
David Davis's speech at formal launch of Haltemprice and Howden campaign
By David Davis Published: Friday, 27 June 08 - 11:26 AM (GMT)
David Davis’s speech at formal launch of Haltemprice and Howden campaign
27 June 2008
CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY
Thank you for attending the launch of my campaign for re-election as the Conservative Member of Parliament for Haltemprice and Howden.
A year ago today, Gordon Brown took office as the fifty-first Prime Minister of Great Britain with the pledge on the doorstep of Downing Street to ‘protect the British way of life.’
A week later, he laid out what he called a ‘route map’ to build ‘a new relationship between citizens and government that ensures that government is a better servant of the people.’
He pledged to make government more accountable, to strengthen Parliament and to pioneer the ‘modern liberties of the individual’.
A few months later he wrote another well-received speech on liberty. He reminded us that: ‘The state is always the servant of the people …’, that ‘Liberty belongs to the people and not governments…’. And he took up the challenge of writing what he described as ‘the next chapter of British liberty.’
In Gordon Brown Britain was promised a very different Prime Minister. A listening leader. A conviction politician. A man who wrote the book on courage.
One year on how different this country feels. We were promised humility but government has grown even more arrogant. We were promised respect for democracy but Ministers have stooped to new lows. We were promised greater respect for the fundamental freedoms that define this great country but the relentless erosion of British liberty has continued unabated.
The trigger for my resignation was the rigged voted on 42 days. Can anyone remember a Prime Minister engaging in more sordid and cynical bout of deal-making, that at one and the same time managed both to buy off our democracy, and pawn off the crown jewels of British liberty?
We already had the longest period of pre-charge detention in the free world. And Mr Brown’s Britain now tops a whole range of international league tables.
The imminent arrival of the most intrusive ID card system in the world. A mammoth liability that both security and IT experts warn will offer up our personal details as a huge, attractive and vulnerable target for criminal hackers and terrorists at a cost to the taxpayer of £19 billion.
We have the largest DNA database in the world, with one million innocent citizens swabbed and sampled, serious criminals left off, and less than 0.4% of crimes detected using DNA.
We have the largest number of CCTV cameras in the world, 1 for every 14 citizens. But 80% of the footage from this half a billion pound investment is unusable and lax controls allow gross intrusions of innocent people’s privacy.
In Gordon Brown’s Britain, the state has amassed 266 separate powers to force its way into your home. In Gordon Brown’s Britain, the state lost 25million child benefit records in the post. In Gordon Brown’s Britain, council spies follow your children home from school, to check they are not cheating the catchment area.
Is this the next chapter in British liberty we were promised?
As the Prime Minister reels from the collapse of his popularity and the disastrous result for his government in the latest by-election, I see three lessons that informed the difficult decision to resign my post as Shadow Home Secretary and my seat in Parliament. Three lessons that will drive my campaign over the next two weeks.
First, you define the courage of your convictions through the actions you take, not the hollow words of a ghost writer. Second, this country respects those who stick up for what they believe in, and refuses to bend and bow to polls. Third, it is high time we took a stand against the sustained assault on British liberty.
High time, we rolled back the creeping intrusions of the state into our daily lives. And high time we checked the power of this arbitrary, abusive and arrogant government.
I believe the stand I am taking is already achieving its aims.
I have been overwhelmed by the support I have received: Across the conventional political divides. From Michael Portillo to Tony Benn. From those with experience fighting terrorism, like General Mike Rose, and those who have been the victim of terrorism, like Terry Waite.
And, above all, I have been humbled by the support from the thousands upon thousands of people going about their daily lives who paused, took stock, and wrote to me with their precious and invaluable moral support.
Raising the level of national consciousness will be one benchmark of the success of this campaign. But my aim is also to send a shot across the bows of the state. To check its inexorable accumulation of power at the expense of the citizen.
Within a week, there have already been some glimmers of hope. The President of ACPO has responded by recognising public anxiety over the trivial abuses of authority and petty intrusions in our lives.
More boldly, the Chairman of the Local Government Association called for a review of council surveillance powers, a move I wholeheartedly welcome.
As for our brave Prime Minister. A year after he entered office he still has no electoral mandate. At this by-election he has again shown himself terrified of the voters. He has gagged Ministers from engaging in public debate with me. He has allowed Cabinet Ministers to issue ugly personal smears on my name. And he has engaged in a concerted attempt to misrepresent my views, including on CCTV and the DNA database.
Within days of my resignation he gave a speech in response. Not in Parliament. Not in a public forum in which he could be challenged. But in a cosy think tank of his choosing.
He says we cannot use nineteenth century means to solve twenty-first century’s problems, conveniently overlooking the epic lessons of the twentieth century.
Well Macavity may be hiding, but we will have this national debate.
In a short while, I will join Colonel Tim Collins, the hero from Iraq, who has fought terror from the IRA to Al-Qaida and hear why he believes we must not to do the terrorists job for them.
Over the next few days, I look forward to seeing supporters up here in Haltemprice and Howden from all the main political parties.
I look forward to campaigning with David Cameron here on Wednesday. Other Labour MPs will be up here too. And I relish the opportunity to join the debate hosted by the Observer on the subject of ‘Liberty in Peril’ and welcome the participation of those on all sides of this important debate.
I will be providing further details on further campaign events in the following days.
Ladies and gentleman, there is a clear choice in this by-election.
It is the choice between a vision of a free Britain which protects our fundamental freedoms and respects personal privacy and Gordon Brown’s vision of an over-weaning, interfering and increasingly authoritarian state interfering in every nook and cranny of our daily lives.
By David Davis Published: Friday, 27 June 08 - 11:19 AM (GMT) Last Updated: Friday, 27 June 08 - 01:53 PM (GMT)
What I Stand For
British fundamental freedoms – including liberty, free speech and trial by jury.
British justice - firm but fair.
Protecting personal privacy from unjustified intrusions by the state.
What I Stand Against
Draconian terrorism laws that make us less – not more – safe.
The database state – careless officials losing our personal information.
A surveillance society – council snoopers spying on local residents.
‘Thought crimes’ and political correctness stifling free speech and peaceful protest.
10 Policies to Protect British Freedom
1.Reverse 42 days pre-charge detention – a ‘PR coup for Al-Qaeda’. 2.Scrap ID cards – put the £19 billion savings towards a Border Police Force and other security measures. 3.Immediate reversal of the ban on free speech outside Parliament. 4.Protect the right to trial by jury. 5.Stop neighbourhood spies using powers that should rest with the police and MI5. 6.Use intercept evidence to prosecute terrorists – but restrict bugging by local councils. 7.Replace 1 million innocent citizens on the DNA database with the serious criminals left off. 8.Make CCTV more effective (80% is unusable) – strengthen punishments for privacy abuse. 9.Slash the 266 separate powers the state has to force its way into the home. 10.Launch an independent inquiry into the government’s serial database failures.
By David Davis Published: Thursday, 26 June 08 - 08:14 PM (GMT)
Formal launch of David Davis campaign in Haltemprice and Howden by-election (polling day July 10) and photocall with Colonel Tim Collins.
All media invited
Time: 10.45 am Place: Willerby Manor Hotel (Best Western), Well Lane, Willerby, East Yorkshire HU10 6ER David Davis will formally launch his campaign for the Haltemprice and Howden by-election on Friday June 27.
He will publish a personal mini-manifesto summarising the urgent policy changes he wants to see to halt the Government¹s erosion of historic British rights and liberties.
Mr Davis will speak and take questions from the media. He will also give details of high profile supporters.
Colonel Tim Collins, a hero of the Iraq war, will be pledging his support for Mr Davis. A photocall and media doorstep with Colonel Collins will be held later in the day (details below)
Mr Davis will be available for one-on-one media interviews after the launch
Photocall with David Davis and Colonel Tim Collins (All media invited)
Time: 3-30 pm Friday June 27 Place: Manor Bar Chesford Grange Hotel Chesford Bridge Warwick CV8 2LD
For more information, please contact: Nick Wood of Media of Intelligence Partners on 07889 617003 or 0203 008 8146 Janice Small on 07889 927430
By David Davis Published: Thursday, 26 June 08 - 11:58 AM (GMT)
Responding to comments by Jill Saward on David Davis's record in addressing violent and sexual crime, the former Shadow Home Secretary said:
"I have every sympathy with Ms Saward's campaign. But it is quite wrong to suggest that I do not care, or have not taken action on sexual violence. During my tenure as Shadow Home Secretary, we launched a review of rape sentencing and pledged additional funding for rape crisis centers. I pioneered a campaign, and secured changes in the law, to stamp out human trafficking, the horrific trade that leads to the rape and sexual abuse of young women and children."
He added:
"It is also wrong to suggest I have called for the removal of CCTV and the DNA database. At present 80% of CCTV footage is unusable, and less than 0.4% of recorded crimes involve DNA matches. I have called for a much more effective use of both CCTV and DNA, with strengthened safeguards to protect the personal privacy of the innocent."
“The Conservative Party had won the argument and the moral victory. There are still battles to be fought in Parliament. As Shadow Home Secretary, in the current polls, you had the opportunity in two years time to reverse not only 42 days but the whole erosion of liberty that you have championed. Why, then, did you decide that your resignation was a more effective strategy for your cause and to achieve your objective of civil liberty reform, than the alternative option open to you: staying in your job, leading the parliamentary battle, and then rolling back the legislation as a great reforming Home Secretary?”
We can still achieve that under the stewardship of my excellent successor, Dominic Grieve, but the truth is that the issue runs deeper than incremental reform.
On 11 June, the government passed 42 days detention without charge in the House of Commons. It marked a watershed, the culmination of eleven years of relentless attrition against our fundamental freedoms. A Conservative government will certainly restore some common sense – we can scrap ID cards and, having re-assessed the evidence, reverse 42 days. But I want to raise the level of national debate, beyond the confines of the Westminster village. I want to take the case to the country, that we are day-by-day pawning off the crown jewels of our democracy, and that the Faustian trade-off between security and liberty offered by this government is a fraud.
I do not believe that such a national debate can wait another two years, and it would be difficult to achieve either in a wider general election or within the confines of the daily news cycle by which the media judge the government of the day. A single issue by-election may be unconventional, but it allows my campaign to reach out to the wider public – 69% of whom approve of the principled stance I have taken.
2) Kevyn Bodman:
“Those of us opposed to 42 day detention without charge are sometimes accused of defending the right of terrorists to blow us up and of not being willing to keep ordinary people safe ... That's a point that needs to countered ... How do you counter it?”
First, the evidence conclusively demonstrates that the police and prosecutors have – in the words of the Director of Prosecutions – coped ‘comfortably’ within the 28 day limit. In fact, the police have not needed more than 14 days in almost a year – let alone 28 or even 42 days. So the police have not been ‘up against the buffers’, as suggested by the President of ACPO. That is factually incorrect.
Second, after the Heathrow plot to blow ten airliners out of the sky in August 2006, all the main terrorist players were charged with conspiracy to murder inside 21 days. The police – quite rightly – made dangerous suspects their number one priority. Five suspects were held for the maximum period. Three of those held for the maximum 28-da period were released, innocent of any charge. The evidence on the two charged at the end of that period was available within 4 and 12 days respectively. They were charged with the lesser offences and both men were bailed – which a court would never sanction if they were dangerous. So, the insinuation by Ministers that 42 days is necessary to protect the public from terrorists who, if released, might immediately escape to detonate a bomb, is at odds with the facts. None of this is a criticism of the police or prosecutors, who understandably work to the limit set by Parliament. But it does show how extensions of pre-charge detention are likely to hit those peripheral to a plot – and the wholly innocent – the hardest.
Third, there are a range of serious practical measures the government has failed to take, which would protect the public – post-charge questioning, use of the enhanced sentence for withholding of computer passwords and the use of intercept evidence in court. That is before we even talk about the government’s lax approach to those that preach vitriol and violence in – and against - this country, which has a stark radicalising effect. The serious charge to be laid against the government is that its fixation on its two big political gestures – 42 days and ID cards – has distracted them from a range of necessary security measures we so sorely need.
Fourth, far from protecting the public, 42 days would jeopardise our security – generating a recruiting sergeant for terrorism. Lord Dear, former Chief Inspector of the Police, has described 42 days as a ‘PR coup for al-Qaida’. And even the government’s own impact assessment reckons it will cut off vital local community intelligence.
3) Jessica:
“Is this some kind of smokescreen? Is your real motive to undermine David Cameron and then in time mount a leadership bid?”
I have ruled out ever running for the leadership again.
4) David T:
“If I were a Tory who thought you were an excellent constituency MP, but who nevertheless supported the 42 day proposal, who should I vote for in the coming election? In particular, how can I make it clear that my vote does not express opposition to 42 days?”
Vote with your conscience.
5) TGF UKIP:
“Mr Davis, much of the pressure on our freedoms is coming not just from Government legislation but from the constant bullying, disguised as peer pressure, by the disciples of political correctness and the climate change lobby. Will you be speaking out against the curtailment of our freedoms by such bullying?”
I am not sure quite what you have in mind. But I certainly am in favour of vigorous debate of all the big subjects of the day. That is why I voted against the government’s thought crimes legislation.
Power to the people - £40,000 raised so far from small donors
By David Davis Published: Tuesday, 24 June 08 - 08:44 PM (GMT)
David Davis has been deluged with donations from ordinary people from all over the UK who back his stand on civil liberties. From pensioners to former MP’s, including Michael Portillo.
To date £40,000 has been raised from small donors alone.
Commenting on people’s generosity, David said: “I have received cheques for £5 from pensioners to many thousands from larger donors, the majority of which is from the smaller donors.
“This fight is about giving ordinary people a voice and standing up for their civil liberties”
By David Davis staff member Published: Tuesday, 24 June 08 - 10:15 AM (GMT) Last Updated: Wednesday, 25 June 08 - 12:26 AM (GMT)
Commenting on President of ACPO, Ken Jones's speech on the civil liberties to the ACPO annual conference, former Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said:
"I am pleased that my resignation last week has already prompted the beginnings of a proper national debate on the erosion of British liberty. The Prime Minister, the Chairman of the LGA and the President of ACPO have all responded in a matter of days.
However, Mr Jones must explain why 80% of CCTV cannot be used for operational purposes, after half a billion of public funds invested. And if he makes the case for the DNA database, he needs to explain why 1 million innocent citizens have been swabbed since 2001, with absolutely no improvement in the 0.4% rate of crimes detected using DNA.
Mr Davis added:
"If Ken Jones really wants a serious and balanced debate - without misrepresentation of either side - I invite him to debate me in Haltemprice and Howden on any date of his choosing."
Davis to Security Minister: You Can't Face Real Debate
By David Davis staff member Published: Monday, 23 June 08 - 10:46 PM (GMT) Last Updated: Wednesday, 25 June 08 - 12:28 AM (GMT)
Responding to Security Minister Tony McNulty's claim that the former Shadow Home Secretary had 'perpetuated a myth' about evidence provided by the police to support the case for 42 days, David Davis said:
"The assertions made by Ministers to make the case for 42 days were wholly undermined by the evidence from police investigations. Last week, I presented clear facts to Parliament in the presence of both the Home Secretary and the Security Minister, demonstrating that the claim that the police were 'up against the buffers' under the 28 day limit was incorrect. Not only were neither Jacqui Smith nor Tony McNulty aware of the basic facts, they did not dispute them when I presented the accurate evidence to the House of Commons. That is hardly surprising, since Dominic Grieve and I had confirmed the facts with both the police and the CPS. "
He added:
"For Mr McNulty to seek to rebut the evidence in the absence of both myself and Dominic Grieve is gutless. He got it wrong. And if he really believes what he is now saying, I invite him to a debate the issue with me - anywhere, any time."
Davis's Successor Grieve Backs Him At Reselection Meeting
By David Davis staff member Published: Monday, 23 June 08 - 10:23 PM (GMT) Last Updated: Wednesday, 25 June 08 - 12:29 AM (GMT)
David Davis was tonight formally readopted by his local party association to fight the Haltemprice and Howden by-election. The former shadow home secretary attended a meeting at Hull Ionians Rugby Club in Brough, East Yorkshire where the readoption took place.
He was accompanied by Dominic Grieve, the new shadow home secretary who also spoke at the meeting. Mr Grieve said: “In most elections the candidate is merely a ‘legal necessity’. This is the exception which proves the rule because this election is about the stand David Davis has decided to take on civil liberties and asking his association to back him in highlighting this urgent issue for the whole country.
“This is not just about 42 days – although that was a catalyst for his standing because of the way the Government handled this vote and their dishonest approach. “It is also about the wider issue of creeping authoritarianism, evidenced by the government’s zeal in collecting data in cannot safeguard, their skewing of the trial process, and increasing restrictions on free speech which become obvious in the way things like the public order act is applied.” David addressed issues not only around 42 days without charge but also issues on the "snooper" state, ID cards and the use of CCTV. He said: "British liberty is vitally important. Our freedoms are continually being eroded by the Government. It is now the time to bring this fight to the people so we can have a national debate on issues that go to the very heart of our democracy in this great country".
By David Davis staff member Published: Monday, 23 June 08 - 02:42 PM (GMT) Last Updated: Monday, 23 June 08 - 05:07 PM (GMT)
In 2004, Richard Thomas – Britain’s privacy watchdog – warned that we were ‘sleepwalking into a surveillance society’. Four years on, it has been left to Sir Simon Milton, the excellent Chairman of the Local Government Association, to take action, calling on local councils to scale back the overzealous use of local surveillance powers.
Everyone wants the police and local authorities to clamp down on crime and anti-social behaviour. But neighbourhood snoops increasingly peer into every aspect of our daily lives. Public bodies have amassed 266 separate powers to forcibly enter the home. There are now 1,000 bugging operations (and other forms of interception of email and post) in Britain every day. Bugging is no longer the preserve of MI5 – hundreds of councils are now entitled to exercise these powers. And it is not just bugging. Local councils increasingly hire neighbourhood spies to investigate petty misdemeanours, including dog-fouling, rubbish regulation and parking entitlements. In one case, snoopers spied for weeks on parents taking their children to school to check the catchment area – leaving one of the young girls with sleepless nights.
CCTV provides another illustration. The current approach is the worst of all worlds – intrusive, ineffective and expensive. This government spent half a billion pounds on CCTV – one camera for every fourteen citizens. Yet police say 80% of CCTV footage is unusable in court. Of course, there are cases where CCTV has helped, but many where it has failed. After the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in July 2005, there was no usable footage from any of the CCTV cameras - on the bus, tube or at Stockwell station. And, CCTV is prone to abuse. In one case, a camera was pointed at a young woman undressing and displayed by operators on a plasma screen at the control centre. We need a more intelligent deployment of CCTV, one which is both more effective and provides better checks on abuse. That way we can catch more criminals and preserve the privacy of the innocent.
The abuse of local powers has followed the example of central government. The government’s fixation with ever-longer periods of pre-charge detention, its obsession with intrusive ID cards and its accumulation of the largest DNA database in the world, has undermined our liberty and privacy, but failed to make us any safer.
Gordon Brown has gagged his Ministers from participating in any public debate on these issues during the by-election, which I am fighting against the relentless assault on British liberty. Today I issued a challenge to every Cabinet Minister, inviting each one to come and debate with me these vital national issues. I won’t hold my breath. This is not a government with the courage of its convictions.
David Davis
This article first appeared on the Guardian's Comment is Free website.
By David Davis staff member Published: Monday, 23 June 08 - 12:04 PM (GMT)
Following denials by the government that it gagged Ministers from participating in debates with David Davis on the erosion of British liberty, Mr Davis has written to every Cabinet Minister, challenging them to a debate.
Speaking from his constituency in Haltemprice and Howden, the former Shadow Home Secretary said:
"Gordon Brown bottled the by-election and he is terrified of any debate on his draconian track record. If he really had the courage of his convictions, if he really believed he was doing the right thing for the country, why doesn't he allow his Ministers to debate these vital national issues?"
David Davis welcomes Call for Review of Neighbourhood Snooping
By David Davis staff member Published: Monday, 23 June 08 - 12:02 PM (GMT)
Today David Davis welcomed calls by Sir Simon Milton, Chairman of the Local Government Association, for councils to review the overzealous and disproportionate use of surveillance powers.
Speaking from Haltemprice and Howden, where he is running a by-election camapign on the issue of the ersosion of British liberty, David Davis said:
"Sir Simon is a brilliant local government leader. I welcome his decision to take a lead in this area, by writing to councils calling for an urgent review of the exercise of surveillance powers. The use of surveillance, interception of communications and other powers should not be used by neighbourhood spies to harrass parents taking their children to school, or to monitor residents' rubbish."
Mr Davis added:
"We are heading towards a surveillance society. The intrusion of the state into our private lives - by central government and local authorities - needs to be urgently checked."
Ministers Gagged on Civil Liberties Debate, Claims Davis
By David Davis staff member Published: Monday, 23 June 08 - 11:43 AM (GMT) Last Updated: Monday, 23 June 08 - 12:55 PM (GMT)
David Davis today claimed Gordon Brown had "gagged" ministers by ordering them not to debate civil liberties ahead of the Haltemprice and Howden by-election.
The former shadow home secretary, who resigned his seat earlier this month over the controversy surrounding 42-day-pre-charge detention for terrorism suspects, accused the Prime Minister of stifling democracy.
But Labour immediately hit back and dismissed the senior Tory's assertions as "deluded".
The row flared after Labour refused to put up a candidate for the July 10 by-election Mr Davis has forced in a stand against what he terms the Government's erosion of civil liberties.
It also follows anger at Cabinet minister Andy Burnham's remarks about Mr Davis's "heart-melting" late night phone calls with human rights campaigner Shami Chakrabarti.
Mr Davis said today: "Gordon Brown's cowardice has plumbed new depths. First he refuses to put up a candidate against me in the by-election.
"Now I am told that he is gagging ministers from engaging in debate about the Government's erosion of our historic rights and liberties.
"Mr Brown is happy to sanction attempts by ministers to damage my case through smears and innuendo.
"But he cowers in Downing Street refusing to debate the issues and instructs his ministers to follow suit.
"His stance is contemptible and undemocratic."
But Mr Brown's aides insisted there was no truth in the claims.
A Number 10 spokesman said: "This is totally untrue. In fact the opposite is the case. We relish the chance to debate the issues around 42 days, the use of CCTV and DNA evidence."
A Labour Party spokesman added: "David Davis is clearly deluded and his quest for publicity is taking on ever more ludicrous terms."
Labour's refusal to take part in the by-election, on the grounds that it is "phoney" and a waste of money, has left Mr Davis with no serious opposition in the contest.
The Liberal Democrats are not taking part because they agree with Mr Davis on the issue of 42 days. Those who have thrown their hats in the ring so far include Mad Cow Girl from the Official Monster Raving Loony Party and a Northampton market trader.
Last night, Mr Burnham sought to defuse a row with Ms Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, insisting his comments about her relationship with Mr Davis had been "misinterpreted".
The Culture Secretary insisted he meant no personal offence and appealed to her to "draw a line" under the row.
He had expressed surprise in an interview with Progress magazine that liberals had been "seduced" by Mr Davis's stance on civil liberties.
He went on to say he found something "very curious in the man who was - and still is I believe - an exponent of capital punishment, having late-night, hand-wringing, heart-melting phone calls with Shami Chakrabarti".
Ms Chakrabarti, who is married, threatened legal action and demanded apologies for both herself and Mr Davis's wife, Doreen.
Mr Burnham wrote to her yesterday saying he had been trying to make a point of "political substance".
He added: "The point still stands and is this: that an exponent of the death penalty is, in my view, an improbable champion of the cause of civil liberties."
By David Davis Published: Friday, 20 June 08 - 03:26 PM (GMT)
David Davis has won the support of veteran Labour left-winger Tony Benn in his Haltemprice and Howden by-election campaign.
The former minister and scourge of New Labour said he was "totally opposed" to 42-day pre-charge detention for terror suspects and urged Gordon Brown to ditch it if Mr Davis was re-elected in the East Yorkshire constituency
Mr Benn, father of Leeds MP and Environment Secretary Hilary Benn, told Labour chairman Harriet Harman he felt free to offer his backing to the Tory former shadow home secretary since Labour was refusing to enter a candidate in the contest.
"This follows the recent vote in Parliament to extend the period during which a person could be held without charge to 42 days, a decision to which I am totally opposed on grounds of principle," he wrote.
"This by-election will give the voters in that constituency an opportunity to register their view on this issue, through the ballot box, which is, and always will be, the ultimate guarantee of our rights in a free society."
Mr Benn went on to draw a parallel with the 1961 by-election in Bristol South East, triggered by his disqualification from the Commons after he inherited a peerage.
Despite being disqualified, he fought the by-election and won, only to be refused a seat in the Commons until the law was changed to allow the renunciation of peerages two years later.
"Though the election court upheld my disqualification, the law was later changed to allow me to take my seat and I hope that if David Davis wins this by-election Parliament will repeal the law which led him to resign," he added.
By David Davis Published: Friday, 20 June 08 - 01:21 PM (GMT) Last Updated: Monday, 23 June 08 - 04:27 PM (GMT)
Former Yorkshire MP David Davis has hailed an east London "metric martyr" as a shining example of why Britain needs to fight for its freedom.
As he met Janet Devers at her market stall, the former shadow home secretary spoke about the importance of jury trial for a "common sense outcome".
Mr Davis has been a vocal opponent of what he calls the Government's "assault on jury trial" as part of the "strangulation of freedoms" which caused him to resign from his Haltemprice and Howden seat.
Mrs Devers told him she had opted for trial by jury as she believed 12 ordinary people would agree she did not deserve a criminal record for offering her customers vegetables sold in pounds and ounces.
Mr Davis, whose by-election campaign will be formally launched on Saturday with the help of veteran Labour left-winger Tony Benn, resigned officially on Wednesday.
He said his resignation was a protest against a "strangulation of freedoms" including Government plans to increase the maximum detention period for terror suspects to 42 days and to allow trials to be heard by a judge without a jury in complex fraud cases and where there is a risk of jury-nobbling.
Mr Davis said Mrs Devers' case emphasised the importance of the right to trial by jury.
"That means 12 ordinary English people who will give a common sense outcome. I can't imagine that 12 good men and true will convict. They will give a reality check on what the state is up to."
Mrs Devers has opted for jury trial for 13 charges of using imperial measures and unmeasured bowls of vegetables at her greengrocer's stall in Dalston.
She told Mr Davis she would prefer not to go to trial at all and would happily plead to the charges if she could avoid a criminal record and only pay a small fine.
Future of Banking Comission - Public Evidence Session
David's 'Future of Banking' Comission has a evidence session on March 15th that is open to the public. It is at the Marriot in Canary Wharf and runs from 1pm until 5.30pm.
Davis's fight is not just for liberty. It is for Britain's soul
By David Davis Published: Wednesday, 25 June 08 - 10:32 AM (GMT) Last Updated: Wednesday, 25 June 08 - 10:35 AM (GMT)
In defending 800 years of hard-won political rights, this rebel is also standing up for a crucial part of the national spirit
* Jan Morris * The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian> , * Wednesday June 25, 2008 * Article history
Whether David Davis makes of himself a public hero or a popular buffoon by his plunge into notoriety, he stands for me as an allegorical monitor of our times. His behaviour has been quixotic, but like the great mad progenitor of the condition, Don Quixote of La Mancha, he is fighting a cause in a truly fateful battle - a battle for liberty of the human spirit.
It is not just a matter of those 42 days, of habeas corpus or even of human rights in the political sense of the phrase: it is an elemental struggle that is dividing the British again into two nations, as Benjamin Disraeli saw them long ago. They are in vulnerable condition anyway, their natural resistance weakened - all in a mess, demoralised, lacking confidence and conviction, enervated by failure and alien principles, swept this way and that by the forces of a rotten materialist culture.
And of the contemporary two nations, it seems to me, by far the greater is giving up on liberty. Anyone can see that in Britain, 2008, individuality is being suppressed, so that year by year, generation by generation, the people are being bullied or brainwashed into docile conformity. What is more ominous is that so many want to be docile. They want to be supervised, cosseted, homogenised, obedient.
The ubiquitous CCTV cameras are the emblems of this malaise, not because of their existence but because people accept them as necessary for the public good: the police tell them so, councils tell them so, statistics proclaim it, and so they believe it, and are perfectly willing to be spied upon, night and day, wherever they go, by unknown, invisible strangers out of sight.
The so-called war on terror is of course the supposed excuse for this appalling violation of all our privacies, together with the ominous rise of the secret intelligence agencies. The public has been gulled into acceptance of the supervisory state, with all its paraphernalia of surveillance and identity cards, DNA databases, armed police and arbitrary search, by the mantra: "If you don't do anything wrong, why worry?"
Brainwashed by a tabloid press of brilliantly insidious techniques, then, numbed by the relentless mediocrity of television, half the people have willingly forfeited the right to make up their own minds, and mutely accept indoctrination. "He's not afraid of anything," I overheard one young mother say to another, watching her three-year-old clambering over an obstacle, but the reply came straight from the state: "Oh that's dangerous, you must never allow him to think like that."
Even the middle classes, once the very backbone of robust individualism, are not immune to the contagion. They all think twice about expressing their views in case they say something that is politically incorrect. They preposterously mollycoddle their children, not only because they have been so repeatedly warned of life's unspeakable dangers but also because they wonder what the neighbours will think. They are officially encouraged to snoop and sneak on their fellow citizens, so snoop and sneak they do.
And when you are afraid to say what you think, it is a step nearer to the most dreadful condition of all: being afraid of what to think. As I see it, Davis's display concerns not just political liberty but liberty of the mind, of the identity, of the spirit - even, patriots might sententiously say, of the national soul. It is not simply 800 years of hard-won political rights he is defending, it is nothing less than a view of life itself, which civilised peoples have so pain-stakingly fashioned down the centuries. It has been an old pride of the British that they, above all, have honoured the truest forms of freedom, with all its anomalies, eccentricities and humour, above and beside all politics, obeying only laws they respect.
A few more generations of nagging and surveillance and we shall have forgotten what true freedom is. Young people will have foregone the excitements of risk, academics will temper all thought with caution, and the great public will accept without demur all restrictions and requirements of the state. Ours will be a people moulded to docility, perfect fodder for ideologues. Then if the one nation of the British slides into autocracy, guided by opportunist or witless politicians and a gullible press, the other nation will be goaded towards despotism too. Already every free soul, I suspect, has sometimes wished that we had a benevolent dictator to sweep all the nonsense aside, the flabbiness and the conformity, the brainwash and all. Some day the structure may crack, and we shall find ourselves under the autocracy of conformists or libertarians - both forced into totalitarianism in defence of their own philosophies.
So perhaps Davis is a prophet as well as a politician. When he talks of habeas corpus he is echoing ideas far older and more profound, reaching back to the earliest yearnings of antiquity, the first glimmerings of human individuality, when our ancestors began to break from tribal disciplines and devise preferences of their own. Tribalism is what every despotism hopes to impose on its people. It is the will of the party, which Davis has apparently flouted. It is the will of the majority, which is one reason why Gordon Brown feels no need to put up a candidate at Haltemprice and Howden. Today the whistleblowers are our guardians of the spirit, and I like to think that Davis is one of them - a true successor of the grand old knight of Castile, but alas, tilting at windmills that are all too real.
· Jan Morris is a historian, travel writer and former Guardian correspondent
David's article on the economy published in the Telegraph
David has written an article on the ongoing economic crisis for the Telegraph newspaper.
Entitled 'Captain Mainwaring & Co can save our banks', David advocates a return to the traditional "narrow bank" system where High Street banks are run seperately from investment banks.
To read David's thoughts in full, please follow the link below to the Telegraph website:
David's article in the Sunday Times (20th December 2009)
Think tank: Teachers are enfeebled by pupils’ slurs
Some years ago a supply teacher in an inner-city school in my constituency was accused by a young girl in his class of putting his hand on her breast.
The story looked like a concoction from the start. The girl was a known troublemaker; her only “witness” was one of her pals; the offence was supposed to have been carried out in a crowded classroom, yet no one else saw it. Indeed, another adult who was in the room said that it had not happened.
Nevertheless, the man was suspended without pay, the council’s children’s services department became involved and the case was passed to the police. It was a year before it came to court and, in that time, he was unpaid and unable to work.
I spoke to the case officer in the children’s services department. The conversation was shocking. She clearly considered that my constituent was guilty and was not interested in the contrary evidence.
In court, the jury took only 20 minutes to decide. The judge dismissed the evidence in pretty scathing terms.
But my constituent’s life was destroyed. He could not bear to return to teaching, even if he could get a job in this suspicion-prone age. Even if you are exonerated, your record often still carries the unwarranted stain on your character. He was turned down as a special constable because of the shadow of the case, even though he had been completely cleared. The judge in the case summed it up pretty accurately: “Teachers live in an excessively power-to-the-pupil environment. The government and members of the public need to be made aware of this growing problem in schools, where one day there will be no more teachers because the word of every child is valued over and beyond that of everyone else.”
I was angry but there was nothing I could do. The cowardice and incompetence of the relevant authorities had done permanent harm, but I could not reverse it. I wrote it off to experience.
Then, recently, another man, a teaching assistant, was put through a similar ordeal. A former Commonwealth champion kickboxer was accused of assaulting an unruly pupil. He was exonerated after eight months of hell, during which he was even banned from seeing his own children for two weeks.
Curiously, it was the same local council department, the same local Crown Prosecution Service and the same police force that had brought the case against my constituent.
In truth this is a nationwide problem. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers recently surveyed its members and found that almost 30% had been the victims of false allegations.
In the past 20 years the balance of power in our classrooms has moved away from the teachers to the children. The consequences for the teachers have often been agonising, even tragic, but the real victims have been the children.
Nobody can learn in an unruly class. When teachers are paralysed by disruptive children, they fail to impart any knowledge to the obedient youngsters. Worse, in some ways, they effectively teach all the children that breaking the rules works.
So we need to change the balance of power in the classroom and return decent standards to many of our schools. That may mean a change in the law. So be it.
We need to return to believing the responsible adult before believing the irresponsible child. We need to punish children who make false allegations and return honest standards to our schools.
So far, so bad. Then, this summer, we had the uproar over the new Independent Safeguarding Authority proposing to check every visitor to a school against the criminal records database. Last week the government conceded that 2m people who visit schools less than once a week will be exempted from the vetting and barring procedure. But that still leaves 9m subject to it.
Surely this is a good thing? After the Soham murders, do we not want to avoid any risk at all of exposing children to the likes of Ian Huntley? True, but the method we have chosen surreptitiously destroys the lives of many who are victims of slanders. The legislation requires the authority to bar anyone from dealing with children or vulnerable adults unless there is “no known reason why an individual should not work with these client groups”.
The decision to ban someone is entirely confined to the authority. Appeals and objections are dealt with inside the organisation. This cannot be right. When it is revised, as Ed Balls, the schools secretary, has promised it will be, a proper judicial check should be inserted so that victims of vicious calumny can rescue their reputations by appeal to a judicial tribunal at a standard of proof beyond reasonable suspicion. We must remove this culture of suspicion from our schools and institutions. British justice demands no less.
David's New Article in the Evening Standard: Eurozone mess shows UK was right not to join
The government tells us that we are out of recession - but only by one tenth of one percent growth. Any smaller and it would have vanished all together. After the brutal negatives of the last year, our economy could not get any more fragile. Or could it?
What if we had been a member of the Eurozone? Had we been in the euro these last few years, our economic state would not be a disaster, it would be a catastrophe. Our already damaged economy would have been crippled by a fixed exchange rate set by the so-called "successes" of the financial sector.
Instead, when our financial sector collapsed, the pound fell.
Outside the euro, sterling has been trading at a competitive level in global currency markets. British exports remained at attractive prices while euro-denominated goods raced to all-time highs against the pound and the dollar in 2009. This is the main reason we had a record manufacturing upturn in January, and without the beginnings of that upturn we would have still been in recession. In Greece, Ireland and Spain, all in the eurozone, manufacturing is struggling. The biggest of these, Spain, is unlikely to see an economic recovery this year.
So managing our own currency is critical to our ability to compete. Giving up our currency would also have meant giving up to the European Central Bank our ability to control interest rates. The ECB has kept interest rates significantly higher than rates in the UK.
The Bank of England has kept our rates low and pumped money into the economy, allowing companies to absorb the shock of recession and start to recover. None of this would have been possible had we joined the euro.
Those countries in the eurozone whose governments have, like Gordon Brown, behaved in a profligate manner, are now paying a fearsome price.
As well as the higher ECB base rate, they are being punished by the bond traders who are charging them for the riskiness of their national balance sheets. Greece, for example, is facing some of the highest interest rates for a decade, and is finding it hard to compete for funds with other eurozone countries.
What is worse, before the current crisis, membership of the eurozone lulled Greece into a false sense of security. Leading up to the budget problems in Greece, their government bond yields barely indicated the growing risk of Greek debt. The market was distorted, failing to convey information about the state of finances in Greece.
Even worse, the rest of the eurozone has been subsidising the bloated spending programmes of the Greek government, offering them no incentive to restrain extravagant and sumptuous behaviour.
This may well be why the Greeks were the first European nation to have their credit rating downgraded. Had we been a member of the euro, we would have suffered a similar fate. To add insult to injury, like Greece, had we been in a similar fix, we would have been denied balance-of-payments aid.
We have our own house to put in order, and that is not something we should entrust to a system controlled by foreign states who, quite reasonably and properly, have interests other than our own.
The UK currently ranks 126th out of 133 countries analysed for the soundness of their banks, according to the World Economic Forum. Our banks are amongst the most likely in the world to become insolvent and require a government bailout. Our national finances are in a parlous state.
Yet unlike the Eurozone countries of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain, our national credit rating has not been downgraded.
Do we want to find our banks, not to mention the families and businesses they serve, in the same position as these governments, trusting their livelihood to Eurocrats, when the financial markets themselves do not trust them?
About 15 years ago, I was one of a team determined to keep us out of the euro. We were influenced by a hard-headed consideration of all the previous attempts to bind the currencies of disparate economies together. Most had crashed and burned at the first stress on the system.
The euro is facing its first stress-test since its adoption in 1999, with the looming financial problems of Greece, and now Ireland, Portugal and Spain, all testing the euro's ability to absorb shocks during a recession. We have yet to see the conclusion of this continent-wide experiment.
For ourselves, the pound has served our country well over the past ten years, in the good times and in the bad. Sterling is helping pull us out of the recession. This is no time to abandon a steadfast friend.
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