The Damian Green affair is slipping down the news schedules in the mainstream media. This is an outrage. One can only imagine the fury that would have greeted the arrest by anti-terror police of an Opposition front-bencher during Margaret Thatcher's reign. Yet with New Labour in power, the story dominates the headlines for a day before slipping into obscurity.
This cannot be allowed to happen. Naturally, it suits the government very well to have the story disappear: Only yesterday it seemed that the very worst that would happen would be the resignation of Speaker Michael Martin. Yet if the case slumps further down the headlines Labour might get away Scot-free.
However, it won't just be Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith who will breathe a sigh of relief if the press pack moves on to new feeding grounds after parliament re-opens tomorrow. For the Opposition leader David Cameron, the Damian Green affair risked provoking the sort of Constitutional crisis he has striven to avoid as Conservative leader.
Cameron, a former PR man, probably reckons he has done the right thing. An outraged article in the News of the World on Sunday. Plenty of outrage in the other papers and grave mutterings that “something must be done.”
We remember the same bluster after Gordon Brown signed the EU's Lisbon Treaty: But no promises of a reversal of Brown's betrayal followed. Similarly, Conservatives have expressed outrage at several other Labour introductions, but have made no pledges to overturn or abolish previous legislation.
Labour has set about wreaking havoc on a Constitution which has taken hundreds of years to develop – yet the Conservatives under Cameron are frightened to strike out legislation written only in the past decade!
Some columnists are aware of the scale of the damage the anti-terror raid on Damian Green's home and offices caused.
Henry Porter explains that no one foresaw that Green's young daughter arrived
from school to find her home swarming with police. Why is it so
important to the symbolism of the affair? Because her appearance allows
the police to enter her name on the Merlin database which requires them to take the details of children who come to their attention when a premises is being searched.
In the Independent, Bruce Anderson describes it as “a terrorist attack on civil liberties.”
Anderson also ties the Green arrest into incremental attacks on civil liberties carried out over the New Labour decade:
“Yet good may come of it. If this official insolence awakens us to the twin threats, to civil liberties and to Parliament, the Green family will not have suffered in vain. In recent years, despite the growing evidence of increasing danger, many of us have been slothful and complacent. Not any more. It may have seemed as if the British lion had joined the lion of St Mark in a neglected museum of extinct grandeur. Not any longer. Our lion is reawakened and it is ready to roar.
“Its claws have plenty of targets. In recent years, it has been impossible to open a newspaper without reading about some new attempt by Her Majesty's formerly obedient servants to undermine some traditional custom or freedom. Carol services are under threat. Musketeers had been firing their weapons for more than 400 years without any threat to the Queen's peace. Some jobsworth decides that a child might be frightened. Banned. Local government employees tell a joke which Jonathan Ross's scriptwriters would reject as absurdly tame. Sacked.
“At a time when the public finances are desperately overstretched, it appears that thousands of civil servants are employed to search out customs, pleasures and decencies which the British have peaceably enjoyed for centuries and prohibit them. Up to now, this has all happened gradually, imperceptibly. Hunting might have provoked a revolt – but the hunters had a better idea. They just carried on regardless. Parliament is not going to carry on regardless. It helps that Damian Green is popular and respected; there is outrage on all sides.”
Wishful thinking? We have seen this before – though it is up to the Conservative Party to give the people a lead, and they show no sign of showing they are up to the task. In the Daily Mail, Richard Littlejohn argues that the Green affair is no “Westminster Story” of interest only to those in Britain's equivalent of the Beltway.
“People are talking about it in pubs, in hairdressers, in bus queues”, he writes, “And frankly, they're frightened. If this kind of totalitarian treatment can be meted out to a member of the Shadow Cabinet, where does it leave the rest of us? That's the crux of it.”
Littlejohn demands radical action from the Conservatives along the lines that EURSOC and Archbishop Cranmer recommended on Monday:
“The Conservatives will have to force the issue. Unless, at the very least, the Prime Minister makes a grovelling apology in the House and delivers up the heads of Smith, (Home Office lackey David) Normington and Gorbals Mick (Michael Martin, Speaker) on a silver platter, they should resign their seats en masse and offer themselves for re-election. That's the real nuclear option.
“Nick Clegg seems genuinely horrified at Green's arrest, so he should encourage his Liberal MPs to do likewise.
“The Queen would have no option other than to dissolve Parliament. The alternative is another 18 months of hubristic, slash-and-burn Labour Government and the further trampling of our historic liberties.”
Doubtless MP David Davis would counsel this course of action, but it seems just too revolutionary for Cameron, who has modelled his Conservatives as a centrist, consensus party unwilling to frighten the horses.
What, then, would Cameron make of the alarm raised by The Sun's influential columnist Trevor Kavanagh, who warns,
“Police chiefs are a law unto themselves. And they are out of control.
“The Government’s kneejerk abuse of anti-terror laws as a political weapon is increasingly sinister.”
Like Bruce Anderson and this site, Kavanagh believes that Damian Green's arrest could be the climax of years of growing disdain for civil liberties under this government – and that it could also be a turning point for dissent.
It uses (anti-terror laws) on any pretext – even freezing the economy of friendly Iceland recently when its banks went bust.
Faceless town hall officials use counter-terrorism as a pretext for spying on our garbage bins and school runs.
Soon, unelected snoopers will be able to pry into our mobile calls, text messages and emails.
These are the alarming consequences of an authoritarian regime that sees the state as paramount and the people as pygmies.
…What we are seeing today is the arrogance of a buck-passing, secretive political class who see criticism as tantamount to treason.
Much as Labour and its tame press would love this story to go away, it is good to see that some at least demand it remains in the public eye.
Hattip Eurosoc
