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The death of liberal democracy foretold

There is increasing alarm in civil liberties and legal circles about the growing authoritarianism of the New Labour government. Barrister John Upton, writing in The Guardian (February 23), warns that New Labour is pursuing a “significant constitutional shift”.

He says: “Without a single terrorist attack taking place, or a single civilian in the UK being killed, a climate has been created so that when we are told by the home secretary that our liberties must be removed in order to ensure our freedom, we meekly accept.”

The announcement that the government plans to increase the staff of the spy agency MI5 by another 1,000 members, allegedly to counter terrorism, is just the latest in a line of decisions that have prompted Upton and others to conclude that New Labour has taken an authoritarian road.

Other measures include the Bill to deny asylum seekers the right to appeal to the courts; the start of the introduction of ID cards; plans to create a national police force accountable directly to the government; the indefinite imprisonment of foreign nationals without charge or trial; the creation of a database of “suspicions” about would-be offenders; the curtailment of jury trials and legal aid and the interception of emails without a warrant. All this in addition to agreeing to the false imprisonment of its citizens by the US at Guantanamo Bay.

As Upton points out: “The secret state's claim that it is losing the never-ending, unprovable war against terror will play its part in the government winning a far greater prize. Across the range of his responsibilities - immigration, policing, the criminal justice system and prisons – Blunkett [the Home Secretary] has either proposed or actually introduced measures whose repressive nature should shock us. That, by now, we may have become inured to them, does not take away from the fact that New Labour is trying to radically change the constitutional environment in which we live.” He adds: “Blunkett is assembling a body of repressive legislation of a type not seen in western Europe since the second world war.”

Upton is correct to warn of the dangers. His reference to the trend away from the “values expressed in the post-1945 social democratic consensus” begins to address the nature of the qualitative change taking place. His solution “to formally delimit the powers of the different actors - government, parliament and judiciary - in the constitution” fails, however, to address both the nature of the state and the forces driving these changes.

A written constitution that Upton favours is in itself no guarantee of freedom, civil liberties or democracy. Just look at what has happened to democratic rights in the US under George W. Bush, where the constitution pledges to secure basic rights. The real truth is that the contemporary state is not a neutral machine but essentially has a class character. In Britain, the state developed to meet the social and political needs of emerging capitalism. Today the capitalist state continues to uphold private property and provides the best conditions for global corporations and financial markets.

Democratic rights and liberties were wrested from this state in countless struggles that involved the sacrifice of lives, mass arrests, deportations and imprisonment. This is an unending battle precisely because it is a reflection of the class struggle itself. Today the trade unions, for example, have far fewer rights than they had in the post-1945 period. The right to strike and picket barely exists in Britain, thanks to Tory and New Labour governments and the supine nature of most union leadership.

The authoritarian state that New Labour is constructing is a response to the demise of much of the legitimacy and authority of the state as a parliamentary democracy. Corporate-led globalisation has eaten deeply into the democratic side of the state and created mass disillusionment in the traditional political process. So the existence of a few “enemies” is convenient, whether they be asylum seekers, terrorists, those who oppose war, or increasing numbers who are economically and socially deprived. For the latter, it is prison on a mass scale that is the “solution”, making Britain the jail capital of Western Europe.

We cannot restore and guarantee democratic and basic rights because the state that is tied so intimately to capitalism and human exploitation is in crisis and development towards dictatorship. That is why it has turned to pre-emptive wars abroad and an attack on liberties at home. We should therefore turn our attention to the project to replace the existing state with new, truly democratic institutions that the majority control in their own interests rather than waste our efforts on trying to revive the dead horse of a failed parliamentary democracy.

Movement for a Socialist Future
23 February 2004