The ever-illiberal Conservative party
Tories always move from libertarianism in opposition to pushing for more state power – and the Lib Dems won't change that
o Conor Gearty
o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 13 May 2010 14.41 BST
o Article history
It might indeed turn out that this Conservative government (with a few liberals in grand-sounding posts to make up the numbers) will turn out to be the crusading defender of civil liberties for which so many of those who turned away from Labour have pined. If this does happen, it will be quite against the grain of history.
The Conservatives have a long record of deploying state power to crush dissent to which their attacks on the poor and on organised labour have invariably given rise. It has been Tory administrations that have unleashed the police against the miners, the print unions and eventually (with the poll tax) the community at large.
The common law powers that serve as the state's residual line of resistance against dissent have never been challenged by any Conservative administration, though they have always seized every opportunity to add to them. It has been at the direction of the party as well that a succession of illiberal laws have been enacted: from Heath's Immigration Act in 1971, through Margaret Thatcher's Public Order Act in 1986 and her attack on gay people with section 28 (to pick two examples among many) to John Major's harsh treatment of prisoners and asylum seekers in the 1990s.
The party has opposed every single progressive measure aimed at countering this drift into deep illiberalism: the early race relations laws pioneered by the Wilson government; the freedom of information legislation enacted in the first term of the Blair government; above all, the Human Rights Act, which of course the Tories wanted to repeal, to be replaced by some vague bill of rights which would require we behave responsibly in return for receiving our "British" rights.
Maybe this will all change, because the Tories have taken an interest in civil liberties in opposition. But this is what the Tories always do: when Labour is in power, the party invariably recovers its antagonism to the state and sings the hymn of libertarianism – until, that is, it wins an election and needs the power of the state to push through its regressive policies. We didn't hear much about Sir Keith Joseph's 1975 pamphlet on the need for a bill of rights ("to save the law from parliament and parliament from itself") after 1979, and it was Thatcher's first lord chancellor Lord Hailsham who argued with comic brio for a bill of rights – but only when his party (and himself) were out of power, happily rediscovering the virtues of "elective dictatorship" whenever he was part of one.
David Davis – the one Tory who actually cares about this stuff – is nowhere to be seen, while another who at least actually understands it, Dominic Grieve, is cast into the legal limbo as attorney-general. The Tory occupation of the civil libertarian centre-ground will last as long as the "big society" smokescreen with which Cameron tried to camouflage the effect of his policies on ordinary people – and it is already long gone, two days into government.
Well, if all else fails, perhaps we still have the Liberal Democrats. True, a few bullet points in their deal with the Tories promise a freedom bill, the scrapping of ID cards, a return to trial by jury, and "the restoration of rights to non-violent protest" – whatever that might mean. Mostly though, it is vague waffle – the kind of thing that gets standing ovations from audiences who think Labour have turned Britain into a police state. But even the high priest of this tribe, Henry Porter, has torn himself away from applauding for long enough to note that "important" tests of the "coalition's real nature" lie ahead – let's start with: immediate repeal of 28-day detention; an end to the banning of peaceful organisations on suspicion of being "terrorist" under the over-wide definition of that term in the 2000 Terrorism Act (which should itself be repealed); an end to control orders; the repeal of arbitrary stop-and-search; and then (reaching further back) repeal of section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, which clearly criminalises protest if the police want to.
But – surprise – none of this is anywhere to be seen in the agreed plan. Instead, it's jury trial (for all offences? What is to happen if convictions can never be obtained because of serial intimidation?), a commitment to less unnecessary stuff on this and that and more safeguards for what we already have – none of it revolutionary or even particularly meaningful. No Lib Dem is in any of the key cabinet positions charged with oversight of any of this agenda. This week's Spectator is absolutely right when it says that "The Lib Dems are left with prestigious-sounding non-jobs ... we have been served up a sausage government and it is never edifying to see how sausages are made. But the meat in this sausage is most certainly Conservative. The Lib Dems are the gristle."
The ever-illiberal Conservative party | Conor Gearty | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
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