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7 December 2003
Last month, the Queen announced the government's package of parliamentary legislation for the new year. It was the most draconian and repressive programme in living memory, proving that Tony Blair not only has no reverse gear, but has the accelerator glued to the floor. Rachel Hardcastle outlines some of the measures and argues that Blair could be heading for a collision.
When David Blunkett took up his post as Home Secretary, he promised to make his predecessor Jack Straw seem liberal in comparison. As the Queen's monotone itemised the legislation to be placed before parliament in the forthcoming session, even Blunkett's worst enemy could scarcely deny the spectacular success with which he has carried out that pledge. Behind the sparse window-dressing of social responsibility (child protection, registration of same-sex partnerships, protection of workers' pension rights) lies the real merchandise of New Labour's Christmas store: an attack on asylum seekers so brutal that even Michael Howard can criticise it from the left; a whole new set of police powers to deal with "civil contingencies" defined so loosely as to include any form of oppositional activity; and the first steps towards the introduction of compulsory ID cards.
The Civil Contingency Bill (CCB), designed to update existing emergency powers legislation, extends those powers to such a degree that they will become not merely authoritarian but verging on the totalitarian. Not only will its catch-all measures be implemented according to highly subjective criteria, but the emergency regulations brought into force would allow the government to "disapply or modify any enactment or a provision made under or by virtue of an enactment." In other words, all existing legislation (including the Human Rights Act) which has been debated and passed in Parliament can be rendered null and void once the Prime Minister or Home Secretary decides that the situation is sufficiently serious to declare a state of emergency.
And how serious is "serious"? No definition is offered: the decision is left entirely to the discretion of the Government. This conferring of arbitrary power on any government - let alone a government as addicted to invoking emergency legislation as Blair's - is unacceptable. Given the radically enhanced powers over people and property which will be handed to the police and other authorities, it will also be repressive.
The existing Emergency Powers Act (EPA), passed in 1964 and amended several times since, defines an emergency in terms of events or actions which "deprive the community or any substantial portion of the community of the essentials of life." Under the CCB, the circumstances which are considered to constitute an emergency will "be widened from limited threats to public welfare to include threats to the environment, to the political, administrative and economic stability of the UK and to threats to its security resulting from war or terrorism."
What are these nebulous threats? Again, whatever Blair, Blunkett or their successors decide. It is hard to imagine any meaningful form of industrial action or protest which does not in some way disrupt administrative or economic stability.
Blair has declared war on both the working class and the anti-war movement with these new laws.
So what specific powers will be made available under the Bill?
* the prohibition of any specified assembly or activity
* the power to establish a 'special regulations tribunal' with apparently unlimited jurisdiction
* the power to allow any specified person to give any oral directions, which, if disobeyed or obstructed, can result in an imprisonment
* the destruction or confiscation of private property, animal or plant life without compensation
* the power to compel a person to act in performance of any function.
The application of most of these powers would run foul of the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). New Labour views human rights legislation as an optional extra, to be watered down for everyday use and discarded completely when required. Blair used the pretext of a "technical" state of emergency to act against the ECHR in pushing through the provision for indefinite detention without trial under the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act of 2001.
In fact, the CCB is deliberately intended to circumvent all human rights legislation. It will state that "emergency regulations should be treated as primary legislation for the purposes of the Human Rights Act." What does this mean? Under European law, national legislation which is at variance with the ECHR may stand, in line with the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, if it is considered as primary legislation which has been debated and passed in the national parliament. Although legal challenges can be raised, the courts can only rule that the legislation is incompatible with the ECHR; they cannot overrule a sovereign act of parliament. No such privilege applies to secondary or emergency legislation.
What the new Bill demands is that emergency powers are given the status of laws subject to extensive debate and amendment. And what rights will aggrieved citizens have, when they are arrested for attending a prohibited assembly or protesting at the uncompensated confiscation of their property? Why, they can go to the courts and have their treatment declared incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. And that is the counterbalance - the only counterbalance - available to the draconian provisions of the CCB through legal means.
Since the entire civilian population can soon be treated as a terrorist threat, it is appropriate that time will be set aside in the coming session for the introduction of biometric identity cards to keep track of these menaces to society. The card has been plugged as an "entitlement card", a nice friendly piece of plastic to make sure that only those entitled to benefits and public services get to use them.
But the ID card is intended not for entitlement, but for exclusion and surveillance. From 2007 onwards, it will be an offence for a foreign national in the UK not to have an ID card, while any UK citizens applying for or renewing a passport or driving licence from 2007 on will have to provide identification in the form of electronically-scanned fingerprints and iris patterning which will then be stored in a national database.
The scheme will also provide another PFI bonanza; security and IT providers stand to make a fortune out of the contracts for providing the cards and database systems. Of course, "entitlement" comes at a price (no rights without responsibilities, remember?): the cards will cost almost £80, to be borne by the applicant.
The card will hold the following information:
* name, date of birth and sex
* address
* nationality
* a unique personal number
* confirmation of the right to work (or not) in the UK
*
Of course, once they are introduced on a voluntary basis, the cards will increasingly become de facto compulsory. How many people who have never left the country have yet had to get a passport simply to open a bank account? Banks and employers will almost certainly demand to see an ID card, thus making life impossible without it. From about 2012, the card will become compulsory: not only bank accounts and social security entitlements, but access to schools and non-emergency healthcare will depend on it.
The existence of a national - and, through the EU, international - database of citizens which will be monitored and shared by various state authorities provides a sinister snoopers' charter for the 21st century. The tired argument that "if you've done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to fear" is laughable. Police recently invoked anti-terrorist legislation against peaceful and legal protesters against the government-sponsored DSEi arms fair. The Data Protection and Freedom of Information Acts offer no protection either: the police and security agencies are already exempted from all of the meaningful provisions of these Acts.
The cards will also be used as another weapon with which to bludgeon those scapegoats of our age, asylum seekers, and will add yet another expensive item to the list of faked documents they must obtain from their traffickers.
The purpose of the Civil Contingency Bill is to criminalise dissent, and of Identity Cards, to identify and "neutralise" dissenters. The measures being introduced by Blair and Blunkett as part of the "war against terror" are indeed creating a wartime environment. New Labour has declared war - on the working class, on the anti-war movement, on the anti-capitalist movement, on asylum-seekers, on Palestinians, on that "terrorism" which is the revolt of the world's poor against their brutal masters. And since war has been declared, battle must commence.
It is clear from the emphasis in the CCB on prohibiting disruption, assembly and activity and from the desire to give names to the masses via ID cards that the one thing this government fears most is mass action, whether in the form of strikes or street protests. They fear the international nature of this struggle, too: part of the impetus towards ID cards comes from initiatives at a European level to monitor all cross-border movements. Apart from migrants and holiday-makers, the most noticeable category of border-crossers have been the tens of thousands who have converged to protest at the meetings of the G8, IMF/World Bank and WTO, and to organise and debate at the European Social Forum.
If more trade unionists follow the path of the wildcat postal strikers, the new powers will be invoked. If protesters continue to gather in their hundreds of thousands in the streets, the new powers will be invoked. Despite and because of this, we must strike and march with renewed purpose and vigour.
If we will not be allowed to do this with impunity, we must be prepared to defend our strikes, protests and marches with defence guards, just like they have on the continent. If we do not have the capacity to defend ourselves in a disciplined and effective manner, we will be left with the poor comfort of a judicial declaration that our repression is incompatible with the Human Rights convention.
We must form social forums, or people's assemblies with all the social forces that will be affected under these draconian laws, both to organise a mass, united campaign to defeat the Bills before they reach the statute book and to resist them should they be passed.
We must also work on an international level, connecting with all those in the workplaces, on the land and on the streets who are engaged in the same fight against the same enemy.
Blair and Blunkett's new laws have not come out of the blue. They are part of an internationally co-ordinated attack on the resistance to globalisation and its imperialist wars. Their measures are taken from the infamous US Patriot Act and, beyond that, the legislation of Third World dictatorships.
That our masters believe such draconian powers will soon become necessary should embolden us, not cower us. Let's show them that they have not over-estimated the threat to their rule; and let's show them what a threat to the political, administrative and economic stability of capitalist Britain looks like.
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