Are liberals wrong on rights?

New Labour’s record on civil liberties has suffered an assault equal to what campaigners say our liberties have. Is this criticism overdone?

David Goodhart, writing in Prospect (the magazine he edits) suggests that we are far from being a Big Brother state and since some high profile liberals have argued that we are, has damaged the possibility of rational debate on the issue.

He is one of the “trade off” school, who suggests that the expansion of CCTV, the growing DNA database, and Brown’s attempt to extend detention without trial to 42 days can all be justified in response to genuine threats on our security. He writes:

‘Nowhere have I heard of innocent people suffering injustice as a result of either technology and, as the father of four children who often travel on their own around central London, I find the cameras reassuring (on some estimates half of all British transport police convictions are won thanks to CCTV evidence).’

He is some ways an apologist for the government. As Dominic Raab points out in a new book, “Assault on Liberty”, the benefits of new technologies are far overblown: CCTV cameras were unhelpful in the inquiry into the Stockwell shooting, for instance. And the potential for abuse therefore, such as CCTV operators spying on young women, need to considered against any supposed benefits.

Goodhart’s view is that liberties is an issue that anti-New Labour folk can use an issue to beat the government over the head with, and instead:

‘It might be useful if we started to see our data as similar to tax, something we willingly surrender to the authorities in return for various benefits, but over which there is also a political negotiation about how much to surrender. The liberty lobby, in this analogy, becomes the Thatcherite Taxpayers’ Alliance of the database state—wanting individuals to hoard their data and leaving the state powerless to serve citizens as it could.’

But the government’s record with new technologies is appalling, frequently misplacing data, failing to record data accurately, and for this reason alone we need to be suspicious about what government is going to do with it.

True, we are not living in an Orwellian nightmare, but if ramping up the rhetoric has made the public sit up and take notice of, say, the hidden costs and dangers of compulsory ID cards, or focus on the treatment of peaceful protestors by the police as an agent of the government, then all the better.

No, this isn’t 1984. And, no, it is not 1930s Germany, either.

But to dismiss liberals like this is equally wide of the mark:

‘Moreover, by turning these complex, technical debates into a story of noble defenders of liberty versus cynical, power-grabbing tyrants (whether politicians or officials) the liberty lobby reinforce the lazy anti-politics of the age—a sort of Ukip for the chattering classes.’