18.06.2008
David Davis's populist turn
Jim Moody examines bourgeois liberal claims
Just when Tory leader David Cameron thought he was on an unstoppable roll, the former competitor for his party’s leadership deserted the Conservative front bench and forced an unwanted by-election. But if shadow home secretary David Davis rocked Cameron’s boat, Brown’s government is also feeling queasy.
Early responses from parliamentary colleagues and most of the press concentrated on Davis’s egotism and supposed madness. Seeing beyond the norms of parliament is hard not only for mainstream politicians. Journalists too remain fixated on the routines, staid methods and centrality of the pantomime that is parliament. One example of this is Steve Richards, who wrote: “Mr Davis heightens misplaced prejudices by claiming he wants a debate on what is happening to civil liberties, implying that there has been inadequate attention paid to this issue ... Parliament debates the topic all the time” (my emphasis The Independent June 17).
David Davis has stated, however, that he is resigning to start a public debate about the government demand for terrorist suspects to be detained for up to 42 days without being charged. Despite continuing to defend the 28 days that currently exists, this thwarted poor boy nearly made good has frustratedly moved to reinvent himself as a right libertarian populist.
Interestingly, though, his campaign is already pulling in allies across the political spectrum. Cameron and the Tory front bench had little or no choice but to back Davis, though in private many shadow ministers and former ministers are darkly muttering against him. Nevertheless the Cameroons want to be seen to be backing their man, even though they think he has gone dangerously maverick.
It is hardly surprising that the Lib Dems decided not to stand against Davis. He is, after all, the sitting MP in a safe Tory seat and is standing on a civil liberties platform hardly distinguishable from their own. Nor, however, it is surprising that Brown decided not to take up the challenge by fielding a Labour candidate. Anyone Labour put up in Haltemprice and Howden would have been soundly trounced. Best therefore to dismiss the whole thing as a stunt that is rapidly turning into a farce. Davis might face Kelvin MacKenzie (but even that is doubtful, given Rupert Murdoch’s lack of enthusiasm). Other than that there will be no-hope fringe candidates.
Showing the disorientation of what nowadays still passes for the left, Davis has won some unlikely support - for example, Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews. Davis’s new-found populism has the possibility of drawing in other such types. Ian Gibson MP is another. Other Davidians include the chair of Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti, who promised in the Mail on Sunday to help set up a ‘Celebrities for Davis’ campaign. Bianca Jagger, speaking at the Stop the War Coalition’s anti-Bush demonstration, was fulsome in her praise of the ‘brave’ David Davis. She is clearly a convert.
Naturally, anyone on the left who even for one moment thinks of supporting Davis should be dismissed out of hand. They have clearly lost any notion of class politics - if they ever had any in the first place. What the Davis affair demands is not some kind of critical support, but a working class campaign against the creeping authoritarianism of New Labour (and of most mainstream bourgeois politicians).
The measure to detain terrorist suspects without charge for 42 days has been steamrollered through the Commons without any evidence to back it up, though with plenty against. For those who can examine the question dispassionately and who look askance at the gung-ho approach of rags such as the Sun, it is a quite outrageous infringement of democratic rights.
The power to detain suspects for 28 days was already an affront to democratic rights. It compares extremely badly with the rest of Europe and with North America. In Italy, for example, the limit is four days; in Canada it is 24 hours and in the USA two days. While some might argue that the USA does have Guantanamo, it is the legal fiction that this concentration camp is extra-territorial and not in the USA proper that allows the US government to keep inmates there uncharged for years. Those held in the USA itself have to be charged after two days. One ludicrous implication of the UK position is that its police and security services are 21 times more inefficient than those of the USA.
Even in Britain the maximum period suspects can be held without charge for non-terroristoffences is 96 hours (four days), which is better than Russia (five days), France (six), and Ireland (seven), but still worse than Germany (end of the day after arrest). But, of course, these variations are not a measure of police efficiency or inefficiency.
All laws and legal measures, in a sense, represent the freezing in time of a particular balance in the class struggle. And, given the low level of that struggle, crucially the class struggle for democratic rights, the state thinks it can get away with bringing in 42-day detention. Similarly, the UK government introduced internment, or indefinite detention without charge, trial or sentence, into the Six Counties of Northern Ireland, with detainees held in H-Block concentration camps. This deeply anti-democratic attempt to cow republicans and the Irish freedom struggle failed miserably. Nevertheless, enticed by the carrot of office, Sinn Féin has now gone fully constitutional.
Clearly, the bourgeoisie is not inherently democratic: far from it. But it does in general stand, in its own interest, for due process and equality before the law. Hence David Davis, the Lib Dems, Liberty, etc. As Davis has said, “Of the people who have been held for four weeks in prison without charge, half of those people were innocent” (The Guardian June 17). Given the wide remit of police action against ‘terrorism’, this should not be surprising. His implication, correctly, is that 42 days in custody without charge is an even greater state crime.
But if 42 days is such an outrage what justification is there for defending 28 days? What about the principle of habeas corpus? Indeed, it is very unlikely that even one single Tory MP would agree with us that 24 hours should be the absolute limit. Very few would even concede that the current UK general criminal limit of 96 hours should also apply to terrorist suspects. Shami Chakrabarti has, when pressed, only talked of a reduction to 14 days.
What is interesting is that Davis will also campaign on the civil liberties issues of ID cards, CCTV cameras and the size of the criminal DNA database: he favours safeguards on the use of surveillance footage and wants DNA records of a million innocent citizens destroyed (though all those who have been and will in future be imprisoned should be on the DNA database. Oh, and he is also in favour of capital punishment for serial killers).
Meanwhile, Gordon Brown, who had to buy the votes of Ulster Unionists to force through 42 days, claims to be someone of principle on the anti-terrorist question. But, try as he might, the prime minister cannot make a democratic case for 42 days or for any of the other Davis targets. How could he? Brown is to the right of Davis on these questions.
While it would have been regarded as astonishing even a decade ago, for someone like Davis to stand as the citizen’s candidate against Big Brother state encroachment on civil liberties it now seems almost too easy. Labour is at sixes and sevens in this whole debate, most Labour MPs having sold themselves body and soul to place-seeking and preferment.
| Read on:  Weekly Worker archive |
