Blair may be leaving office, but I have the sinking feeling he's not going anywhere. He's going to be part of the national body politic for some time to come. Not the move into the serious old age of Thatcher, or to the cricket of Major for him. This is bad news for us all, but none will take it as badly as Gordon Brown I think.
Anyway, Blair's aiming to go out with a bang for now. In an article in the Sunday Times this week he defended control orders:
We have chosen as a society to put the civil liberties of the suspect, even if a foreign national, first. I happen to believe this is misguided and wrong.
Blair better hope that whenever he comes up against a war crimes tribunal that it doesn't operate on his standard of human rights. For, it could easily be argued at the time that given the nature of the star witnesses, particularly in the security services, that it would be better not to have a trial at all and move straight to sentencing. But because that wouldn't be entirely fair, we'd just lock him up in his front room with no access to the outside world.
The article came on the back of the three absconders from their control orders. This has presented a propaganda opportunity to Blair and John Reid to push for more draconian legislation, or go down blaming Parliament and judges if it doesn't happen. But there's an important point here which Blair alludes to:
We gave ourselves the ability, in exceptional circumstances, to detain foreign nationals who we believed were plotting terrorism but against whom there was insufficient evidence to prosecute.
Where most people would think it fairly important to reach a point of prosecution before doling out punishments, this is a mere technicality for Blair and Reid. When Peter Hain spoke on Sunday warning about the "domestic equivalent to Guantanamo Bay" he was talking about new 'stop and question' powers. He didn't acknowledge we already have it on the statute book in a far more apparent manner.
Fascinatingly, Ian Bell argues that Blair and Reid are getting to the philosophical point where they can argue that there is no such thing as a human right. Reid has continually threatened to opt out of the ECHR, a document drawn up after WW2 to stop fascism, which includes things like arbitrarily detaining people. Guantanamo Bay has been normalised here in the UK. Who knows what the mental state of these three men is after their treatment under control orders.
But the biggest paradox comes from another point in Blair's article:
I was stopped by someone the other week who said it was not surprising there was so much terrorism in the world when we invaded their countries (meaning Afghanistan and Iraq). No wonder Muslims felt angry.
When he had finished, I said to him: tell me exactly what they feel angry about. We remove two utterly brutal and dictatorial regimes; we replace them with a United Nations-supervised democratic process and the Muslims in both countries get the chance to vote, which incidentally they take in very large numbers. And the only reason it is difficult still is because other Muslims are using terrorism to try to destroy the fledgling democracy and, in doing so, are killing fellow Muslims.
What’s more, British troops are risking their lives trying to prevent the killing. Why should anyone feel angry about us? Why aren’t they angry about the people doing the killing?
Well maybe because they are not my Prime Minister, who lied in order to create this mess he was warned about. But my point here is this: Blair swats away any criticism of the Iraq war, the killing and the resultant security situation by reference to democracy and the ability of people to now vote. This is first priority for Blair in Iraq.
In Britain meanwhile, rights and democracy have to be sidelined for security - or at least Blair's conception of what will lead to it.
"We gave ourselves the ability, in exceptional circumstances, to detain foreign nationals ... against whom there was insufficient evidence to prosecute.
Where most people would think it fairly important to reach a point of prosecution before doling out punishments"
In fairness to those who support detention without trial, this is not supposed to be a punishment for a crime but to prevent the committing of possible future crimes.
Posted by: Thersites | 31 May 2007 at 07:37 PM