Free Speech – Not so Free

The ever excellent Henry Porter keeps up the heat on the government and its creeping fascism:

The art of government these days is to extend power without people noticing. Gordon Brown proclaims his solemn duty ‘to uphold freedom of speech, freedom of information and freedom of protest’, yet his ministers steal through the night to attack each one of these rights. We are moving with a sickening speed to a point where the reality of government intentions is the precise opposite of its presentational rhetoric.

Well, yes… This, in part, was what Orwell satirised (if satire is the appropriate word here) with “slavery is freedom”  in 1984. The misuse of language to make words mean the precise opposite of their original meaning is something that runs through the novel and is reappearing today in the rhetoric of this administration.

On Monday new regulations came into force, after a personal decree by the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, that give nearly 800 public bodies the right to access your telephone records – mobile phone and landline – and make it compulsory for all phone companies to keep those records. So the data of your calls and text messages may be accessed by any damned busybody in any agency stretching from the Scottish Ambulance Service Board, the Food Standards Agency, the Environment Agency to every local council in the country. Naturally, the intelligence services and police are provided with the usual easy pass into your private life.

This is the casual and cynical manner in which the government treats the privacy of the ordinary citizen; we are all suspects until we prove otherwise. Any reasonable person should find this abhorrent. Unfortunately, the majority of the populace are so busy sleep walking that they fail to notice. These are the people who think that Big Brother is a piece of dire reality television, so dumbed down and compliant has our society become.

Then, of course, one of the other fundamentals of a free, liberal democracy; the right to protest is under attack by our rabid anti-freedom government:

Which brings me to the third panel in the triptych of Gordon Brown’s conference pieties – his love and support of the freedom to protest. Clearly this does not extend to the demonstration tomorrow, timed by its organisers, CND and Stop the War Coalition, to coincide with Brown’s statement on Iraq. It begins at 1pm with a rally in Trafalgar Square and is due to proceed, with the octogenarians Tony Benn and Walter Wolfgang at its head, to Parliament Square.

…

With archaic relish, they have banned the march because it may impede the progress of any MP or peer who wants to attend Parliament (it is surprising there is no mention of Mr Speaker’s coach and four). The organisers have guaranteed that access, but the ban stays in place, which is odd given that the Prime Minister is on record as saying he wants to repeal the section of SOCPA that requires police permission. As everyone now realises, the use of Sessional Orders may stop all demonstrations while Parliament is sitting. The repeal of the relevant sections of SOCPA, if it happens, will not make the slightest difference.

This, people, is the behaviour of the totalitarian. In this case, a totalitarian who is afraid to be judged by the people he is paid to serve. Porter finishes with a dark warning about the nature of the relationship between the governed and those who govern:

…as I have said many times, we need constantly to remind this government of our rights. If they are to be removed by the same law used to frustrate the Chartists, a profoundly significant moment has arrived, which may cause people to wonder what else lies behind Labour’s rhetoric.

What else lies behind the rhetoric is an utter contempt for the rule of law, for liberty, the right of free speech, the right of association and the right to protest, because all of these things threaten their hold on power, and it is that hold on power that drives these authoritarian control freaks. They are contemptuous and contemptible and they have betrayed the trust placed in them, deserving of nothing other than derision (and a rope slung from the nearest lamp post). Short of a hung parliament – in both senses of the word – whichever set of self-serving jackanapes seizes power, nothing will change. A hung parliament on the other hand, is incapable of doing anything very much, which is just what government should be doing