Charles Clarke protests too much
A familiar trick of the bully is to accuse an opponent of the very vice the bully himself practises. So when the Home Secretary spoke yesterday of the “distorted” reporting of his security policy by the media, and the “dangerous poison” of depicting Britain as a sort of dictatorship, it would be unwise to take his words too seriously.
Charles Clarke may have acted in some respects in good faith to try to prevent our country coming under murderous attack from terrorists.
He has also, however, sought to introduce illiberal measures that belong to a time of total war, such as identity cards, control orders, detention without trial and restricting the jurisdiction of ordinary courts.
It was the last of these that caused the former law lord Lord Steyn to accuse the Government recently of being “prone to authoritarianism”. For his pains, Lord Steyn has also felt the rough end of Mr Clarke’s tongue, being branded by him yesterday as “offensive and wrong”.
It might be supposed, from the ferocity of Mr Clarke’s attack on the media and on this senior judge, that a raw nerve has been touched. The fact is that this Government’s disregard for our liberties goes far beyond what the Home Secretary has attempted to do.
The Government in which he holds high office has made a veritable career out of undermining our democracy. The Prime Minister himself has a blatant disregard for Parliament, treating the Commons with contempt and the Lords as a neutered repository for his paymasters.
The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, now under promise of amendment, would, in its original form, have enabled the executive to change almost any law it wanted, and for any reason, without consulting Parliament.
The Government has always sought an obedient Parliament, a compliant judiciary, a supine press that takes dictation from its spin doctors and a police force designed purely to implement its policies. Mr Clarke fails to see the huge dangers for a country such as ours of institutional arrangements such as these.
But then, of course, we forget that the same Charles Clarke who now acts like an old East European interior minister from the era of Honecker and Ceaucescu was once a fanatical student radical who enjoyed his visits to the
He says that those who talk of our being a “police state”, and make other disobliging references to totalitarianism, are “truly offensive”.
What he fails to see, perhaps, is that we are making the most of exercising our right to say these things - with some justification - while he and his sort still permit us to do so.
