Preparing for the 'Strong State'? Tony Blair's government has been characterised by a relentless attack on civil liberties. Piers Mostyn asks whether the ground New Labour, new year, new law. The new Anti-Social Behaviour Act empowers the police to control and crim- inalise the behaviour of people in public places: prevent- ing young people from gathering in groups of more than two, imposing curfews, broadening powers to issue on- the-spot fines. Last year's Criminal Justice Act was a hymn to the law- and-order lobby and the twelfth criminal law statute since 1997. Rolling back a swathe of basic rights, it substantially erodes the fundamental principle that an accused person is innocent until proven guilty. Further back, a system of summary justice was created in which people's assets could be seized without any offence having been committed and bugging and sur- veillance were put on a statutory footing.' There has been a major redefinition of "terrorism', now interpreted so widely that it could encompass almost any type of militant political activity. And the government has derogated from the Human Rights Act in order to introduce internment without trial - as a result of which fourteen men, one of them with a serious mental illness, have languished in Belmarsh prison for over two years, unable even to know the case against them. That it took the courts sixteen months to release just one of these internees because there was not a scrap of evidence against him simply underlines the iniquities of this system? In the pipeline is the Civil Contingencies Bill, granting draconian powers in the event of a crisis, but dependent on a trust between public and government on security issues that has become somewhat strained over the past eighteen months. Further proposals range from trials with state-appointed defence lawyers and vetted judges to a greater use of phone-tap evidence. In addition the government is introducing ID cards, a national DNA database and an FBI-style national police force. issue 003 spring, 2004 Socialist. Outlook Page 19 is being prepared for a 'strong state'. Europe's lifer capital MI5 will allow for the recruitment of a thousand new intelligence agents. And prison numbers, at a record high of 75,000, mark Britain out as locking up more people per head of popula- tion than any other country in Europe.? Of these prisoners, over five thousand were serving life sentences in England and Wales, more than in the whole of the rest of the European Union combined and ten times more than in France making the country 'Europe's Lifer Capital'* Prison numbers are expected to rise by a further 14,000 purely due to the new legislation. All this in the context of a so-called 'war on terror' heralding a global imperialist offen- sive. George Bush unleashed the Patriot Act, the mass detention of Muslim Americans and Guan- tanamo Bay. Israel has reduced Palestine to a cross between a vast prison camp and a shooting gallery for helicopter gunships complicity. There has been a major increase in cross-border repressive measures in Europe.' This gives just a flavour of the trend towards repressive government. How do we rebut the claim that it is justified by new and serious dangers facing society? mage ince it to or gamacks The general attack on civil liberties began long ago under the Tories. They met the inner city To enforce all of this, police numbers in England and Wales have been expanding by 6,000 a year to a record high of 138,155 by March this year. A massive boost in spending on 1 This refers to two statutes (Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 and Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000). 2 For a critique of these laws see my articles in Socialist Outlook May 2002 and various issues of Socialist Resistance also www.liherty- human-rights.org. uk and www.cacc. org.uk. 3 According to an Institute of Public Policy Research report in July 2002, if incarceration - with Western levels were reduced to the European average, the prison population would be slashed to 49,000. 4 Prison Reform Trust 19 March 2004 www.prisonreform- trust.co.uk 5 See Sam Feeney: 'War on Terror: Death to Civil Liberties' Socialist Outlook, Autumn 2003. 6 See www. revolts of 1981, the miner's strike of 1984-5@@• @@•statewatch.org.uk POLITICS
•••and the social polarisation and by Thatcherite economic restructuring with a continuous crackdown on public order and trade union rights and the extension of police powers. In the criminal justice system miscarriages of justice abounded. the right to silence was withdrawn, and sentencing upped. But even before that, Bloody Sunday, internment, torture, paramilitary policing, shoot-to-kill policies, and the scrapping of jury trials and the right to silence were all features of British rule in the North of Ireland from the 1970s. Contemporary so-called anti-terror laws can trace their origin in a seamless continuity to the Prevention of Terrorism Act 1974. Initially justification was claimed by the supposed 'emergency', but the ending of the armed struggle of the IRA did not end the repressive laws. Sep- tember 11 was an excuse for a major escalation but the trend was apparent long before. However it is generally accepted that overall crime has been declining over the past decade. Even though rising violence has been an exception to this trend, gun crime (for instance) had levelled off by 2001. Similarly terrorist no deaths or serious injuries in recent years. 7 Hat; Linebaugh, Rule, Thompson & Winslow 1975 Albion's Fatal Tree: crime and society in eighteenth-century England, Peregrine, p. 18. 8 Peter Linebaugh, 1991, The London Hanged, Penguin, p.xv. 9 Hay, p. 22. 10 (9) EP Thompson, 1975, Whigs and Hunters, Penguin. The Black Act (initially passed in 1723) was purport- truants and their parents). edly a response to an 'emergency created by armed gangs with masks (known as 'blacks') pillaging Royal Forests and battling forest officers. Capital into police racism and the Bloody punishment was mas- sively extended to cover a wide range of offences including cutting down trees, poaching and fishing, public order etc, it context. 'signalled the onset of the flood-tide of eighteenth century Eighteenth century retributive justice'. p. 23. 11 Thompson, p.207. 12 See Bernard Porter, (1987), The Origins •t the ligilant State, London. Heidenfeld d. Nicholson. POLITICS alienation caused censorship cluded that, incidents in this country are at a low level - with Whatever the likelihood of attacks in the UK over the coming months, then, current repres- sive measures are therefore not a series of rational and discrete responses to specific problems. There is no correlation between them and any real 'threat'. The common theme to these measures over two to three decades is their across-the-board character. Not only do they cover 'terrorism' and criminal justice but threat of the gallows." the social control and criminalisation of the most disadvantaged in society - young people, the mentally ill, asylum seekers, the homeless and even those who find it difficult to manage in the education system (via the criminalisation of ism today. All this from a Labour Party that in opposition opposed the authoritarianism of the Conserv- ative Party and promised a new era of rights Liberalisation and crisis and liberties upon election. Hopes raised by the Human Rights Act, the MacPherson Inquiry Sunday Inquiry have since been betrayed. Is it just the old story of Labour succumbing to the Right's agenda once in power or is there more to this? It helps to look at these dynamics in historical anti-union combination acts. The period from 1688 to the 1820s was one of heightened repression. The number of statutes carrying a death penalty increased from fifty to two hundred. Almost all involved offences against property? Peter Linebaugh has pointed out the irony of the double meaning of the word 'capital' - a crime punishable by death and the accumulation of wealth founded on the product of previous (dead) labour.® But the pattern was contradictory. Despite the proliferation of new draconian laws, the number of those actually executed for property offences remained remarkably constant.? This suggests the laws' function was ideological and not simply punitive and the new ruling class felt insufficiently secure to be as ruthless in practice as they threatened to be. This caution was born out in cases like the acquittal of the leader- ship of the London Corresponding Society - a prototype of the Chartists - in a celebrated trial in 1794. E.P. Thompson, in his study of the 'Black Acts'," con- The act registered the long decline in the effectiveness of the old methods of class control and discipline and their replacement by a standard recourse of authority: the example of terror. In place of the whipping-post and the stocks ...economists advocated the discipline of low wages and starvation, and lawyers the sanction of death. Both indicated an increasing impersonality in the mediation of class relations, and a change not so much in the 'facts' of crime as in the category of 'crime' itself as it was defined by the propertied. What was now to be punished was not an offence against men ... but an offence against property ... In the 17th century labour had been only partly free but the labour still asserted large claims (sometimes as perquisites) to his own labour's product. As, in the 18th century; labour became more free, so labour's product came to be seen as something totally distinct, the property of the landowner or employer to be defended by the A parallel can be drawn between the way the transition to new economic relations was managed by state repression three centuries ago and a similar handling of the social and economic contradictions characterising neo-liberal capital- Eighteenth century repression was followed by a period of relative liberalisation with a gradual extension of rights between the 1820s and the 1870s. British colonial and industrial expansion allowed for the revolutionary wave sweeping Europe in the early part of the century to be met with a reduction in capital offences, an extension of the franchise, prison reform and the scrapping of the But the emergence of challenges to British imperial- ist hegemony - the growth of Irish Fenianism and the 'threat' from Germany - combined with economic depression and the birth of mass trade unionism, began to swing the pendulum the other way. The establishment of the political police in 1887 - known as the Irish Special Branch"? - was followed closely by the first ••• Page 20 Socialist_Outlook spring, 2004 issue 003
••• Official Secrets Act in 1889. However, it was not until the eve of the First World War that the next repres- sive wave really took root. From the founding of MIS in 1909 and the Official Secrets Act 1911, through the Defence of the Realm Acts of 1914-15 and the Emergency Powers Act 1920 to the Incitement to Disaffection Act 1934 and the original Public Order Act 1936 - we can trace a catalogue of measures that bear many of the hallmarks of the today's authoritarianism. It started with imperialist crisis and war and the pres- entation of 'temporary' emergency laws as 'necessary'. These were then rolled over in peacetime for use against industrial militancy, the Communist Party and the strug- gles of anti-fascists and the unemployed. "3 Although there is little doubt the repression of this time was very real, it was also a period marked by democratisation with a diminution of the power of the House of Lords, the universal franchise and the development of a mass reformist and vibrant communist working class politics. Unlike the eighteenth century in which the attacks had a particularly social and economic focus, these seem more political in aim. The 1916-23 upsurge of insurrectionary Irish nation- alism, which was eventually smashed through parti- tion, also led to the longest running and most draconian 'emergency' laws under Stormont's Special Powers Act 1922 - only repealed in the 1970s and ancestor of the emergency laws of today. The experience of this period confirms the lesson that the British labour movement fails to confront such assaults at its own peril. The period after 1945 saw another era of relative liberal- isation with legal aid, the abolition of the death penalty, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the removal of the property qualification for jurors and so on. Post-war working class radicalisation was thus met by welfarism, financed by the economic boom. But the boom did not last and that brings us back to the present. The crackdown started, as we have seen, with the use of repression to prop up British rule in Ireland But there was also the slower mounting of 'pressure' in Britain - with the black community, in particular, bearing the brunt of police harassment and other attacks that, by the 1980s, spread to a generalised assault on working class communities, the unions and any move- ments that tried to resist. History lessons One obvious lesson from this history is that there has been no linear progress towards greater and greater repression under capitalism - any more than there has been a move towards some inevitable and cataclysmic crisis. But it also emerges that the 'liberal' periods are the exception, with repressive periods accounting for up to two hundred of the last three hundred years. issue_003 spring, 2004 Socialist Outlook Page 21 Schematic these 'waves' may be, but they indicate an ebb and flow, correlating with periods of political and economic restructuring and crisis. What is significant about the current period is that it involves repression both of the socio-economic (social control, increased police powers, criminalisation of working class communities, harsh penal policies) and the political (control of protest, 'anti-terror' measures, surveillance, etc) varieties. However, as in the eighteenth century where the state's bark was sometimes worse than its bite, today the balance of class forces is far from enabling a carrying through of true 'strong state' repression. Consider last November's confrontation between the Stop the War Coalition and the police over the anti-Bush demo - the police had all the powers they needed to decide the route or even ban it, but could not for essentially political reasons. Eighty years ago demos and meetings of the Communist Party, the unemployed workers and anti-fascists were routinely banned. Similarly the uproar over Guantanamo, the release of a Belmarsh internee, the dropping of whistleblower Katharine Gun's prosecution and other examples show that the balance is not all tipped one way. A question that arises is why, despite the global character of the current authoritarianism, some leading capitalist states (Britain and the USA) are locking up so many more than others? The answer, though beyond the scope of this article, must lie in the greater advance of the neo- liberal economic agenda in these countries and the more pronounced nature of the social contradictions created. A new feature today is the growth of a whole sector of the capitalist economy dedicated to servicing the penal and security industries. A trend that originated in the USA, it allows for a thinly disguised pumping of state money into private hands similar to that which took place under the 'military-industrial complex' of the cold war era. In this case the "prison-industrial complex',' a powerful nexus of security industry, government and private capital, closely allied to racist home and foreign policy agendas, has an economic logic of its own as it hoovers up billions of pounds incarcerating (dispro- portionately black) young people instead of spending money educating them and ing them with jobs. 13 K.D Ewing & C.A. Gearty; (2000), The Struggle for The current authoritarianism is a permanent Civil Liberties: and increasingly ferocious element of neo- political freedom liberal capitalism. To some extent the 'strong and the rule of law state' hangs between ideological threat and in Britain, 1914-45, Oxford University repressive reality, dependent on the balance Press. of class forces. How far it is allowed to go will 14 Christian Parenti, depend on the fate of this economic and polit- (1999), Lockdown ical system and the degree of resistance. I America: police and prisons in the age of crisis, Verso. The USA leads the globe by imprisoning up to 2 million of whom 50% are black. POLITICS