Following Michael Howard’s decision to back the ID card proposal in principle – well, he would, given his plans back in 1996 when he was Home Secretary – the Tories decided to abstain during the third reading of the ID cards bill in the Commons because, according to shadow Home Secretary, David Davies:
“…ministers had failed to give assurances on how the scheme would work in practice.”
Okay – so why didn’t they have the courage of their convictions and vote against?
The bill now having passed its third reading in the house goes to the Lords where, according to the Prime Minister this action has paved the way for:
“Tory peers to join forces with Liberal Democrats in the Lords to kill the bill.”
I should damn well hope so – at least the Lords (outmoded and unelected as they are) have the courage to stand up to the government and block bad law. Well, sometimes, anyway.
Home Secretary Charles Clarke waded into the Tories saying:
“If in the final event, it does come to the case that we are not able to carry the legislation in this Parliamentary session, we will know quite clearly that the reason will be the decision of the opposition party, and their decision to put peace internally within their party ahead of the national interest.”
However, what Charles Clarke means by “National Interest” is not one of a free, democratic people, but one of subjects belonging to the overweening, over powerful state. One where the basic relationship between electorate and state is reversed, where we answer to them, rather than the other way around.
I am reminded here not of George Orwell’s 1984 which is often (correctly) cited in these debates, but his equally prophetic Animal Farm. In the closing scene of the book, the pigs who overthrew the humans start quarreling with the erstwhile owner of the farm over a game of cards:
No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I look at the front benches of the House of Commons and “it is impossible to say which is which.”
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