Brown’s security strategy is the worst of all worlds

David Davis
Wednesday, 2nd July 2008
Spectator

http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/811001/browns-security-strategy-is-the-worst-of-all-worlds.thtml
http://tinyurl.com/5qy88z

It’s draconian, expensive and ineffective, says David Davis. All the
evidence shows that the Prime Minister is eroding our civil liberties
pointlessly

As shadow home secretary for five years, it became an office joke that,
faced with difficult policy questions, I would demand ‘get me the
evidence!’ I am a scientist by training and, while 69 per cent of the
public believe I took a principled stance in resigning from Parliament,
that decision was also based on a rigorous empirical assessment of the
evidence. The reality is that the relentless stream of repressive measures
taken by this government over the last eleven years — whether 42 days
pre-charge detention or any other — has not made us any safer. In many
cases, they have jeopardised our security. In other cases, they are an
irrelevant distraction — of time, resources and energy — from the real job
at hand, namely protecting the public.

Terrified of the electorate, Gordon Brown decided that Labour would not
contest the by-election occasioned by my resignation, even gagging
ministers from debating the government’s record. Yet he could not resist
responding to my resignation in a speech he gave on 17 June in the cosy
confines of his favourite think-tank. That speech made two things crystal
clear. First, he stands behind the sustained assault on British liberty, so
expect more to come. Second, he has no idea about the effectiveness of his
security policies. 

Take 42 days. Mr Brown said it was difficult to claim that the change in the
terrorist threat was not ‘serious enough to justify change in our laws’.
Yet he offered no evidence to justify yet another extension — the limit
quadrupled between 2003 and 2005 — which explains why the Director of
Public Prosecutions concluded that the 42 days proposal was ‘unnecessary’
and ‘irrelevant’. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner conceded there was
no evidence. Others who support 42 days, like Ken Jones (president of ACPO,
the Association of Chief Police Officers), quietly confessed they had not
scrutinised the evidence. Nor had ministers. Jacqui Smith pointed to the
alleged Heathrow 2006 plot to blow ten airliners out of the sky. Five cases
had gone to 28 days, so surely Ken Jones was right to say police were ‘up
against the buffers’? In fact, the evidence showed that all the main
players in the conspiracy were charged within 21 days. Of the five held for
28 days, three were innocent (released without any further suspicion). The
other two were charged with less serious offences based on evidence
obtained after 4 and 12 days, not up against the wire. They were both
subsequently bailed — hardly high risk cases. So, the DPP was right. They
had coped ‘comfortably’ within the 28-day limit. 

If 42 days is unnecessary, it will also jeopardise security. Colonel Tim
Collins, the hero from Iraq who has fought terrorists from the IRA to
Al-Qa’eda, is the latest to warn that 42 days is a draconian response that
plays straight into the hands of the terrorists. It will also harm
intelligence. The government’s own impact assessment points out that 42
days risks cutting off local community intelligence. Mr Brown lectures that
42 days ‘ensures both our tradition of liberty and our need for security’.
But the evidence roundly refutes him on both counts.

Next up, ID cards. Mr Brown claimed that biometric technology offers ‘one of
the best examples of how we can confront the modern criminal while
respecting liberties’. Experts say just the reverse. By clustering masses
of personal data on one vulnerable database, ID cards create what
Microsoft’s national technology officer calls a ‘honeypot’ for hackers and
terrorists — not least since the biometric technology can be cloned with a
gadget costing £100. 

On to the DNA database, which Mr Brown rambunctiously claims
has ‘revolutionised the way the police protect the public’. Bit odd, given
that less than 0.4 per cent of crimes are detected using DNA. He added
that, if the database had not been widened to retain 1 million innocent
people’s DNA, criminals guilty of 114 murders and 116 rapes ‘would in all
probability have got away’. This is just nonsense. But don’t take my word
for it. GeneWatch, an independent not-for-profit organisation, roundly
rubbished Mr Brown’s figures as deliberately misleading (the ten-page
rebuttal is available at www.genewatch.org). For the record, I have never
proposed the abolition of the database. I just think it would better serve
law enforcement and personal privacy if Mr Brown replaced the 1 million
innocent people currently on the database with the many thousand serious
criminals he has left off. 

Next, CCTV. Mr Brown made fewer claims, which is not surprising since Home
Office reports say that 80 per cent of CCTV footage is unusable. Instead,
he issued a party briefing entitled ‘Challenge the Tories on CCTV’, calling
on Labour minions to spread the lie that I am ‘in opposition to CCTV
cameras’. In the document Tony McNulty, the Home Office minister of state
for security, says, ‘CCTV is a powerful crime-fighting tool... CCTV makes
our streets safer.’ He clearly has not read the Home Office’s 2005
evaluation report, which found that CCTV ‘had little overall effect on
crime levels’ — cutting crime in only 7 per cent of deployments.
CCTV ‘played no part in reducing fear of crime’ and ‘public support for
CCTV decreased after implementation by as much as 20 per cent’. I am not
opposed to CCTV. But I have consistently called for more effective
deployment, coupled with stronger sanctions for abuse of innocent people’s
privacy.

Then there is surveillance. At this point, Mr Brown has run out of bogus
statistics. The fact is there are 1,000 bugging operations in Britain every
day. Councils bug local residents, but there is still a ban on using
intercept evidence to prosecute terrorists. Neighbourhood spies follow our
children home from school, and investigate a range of trivial
misdemeanours. Is that really how we want our soaring council tax rates
spent? Wouldn’t precious local resources be better spent on putting more
police on the street, given the doubling of violent crime and rising
anti-social behaviour?

Finally, there is the attack on free speech. On the one hand, we have seen
the arrest or prosecution of peaceful protesters — like Walter Wolfgang or
the anti-war protesters reciting the names of Iraq war dead outside the
cenotaph in Whitehall. On the other, Abu Hamza and the Danish cartoon
protesters are left to preach hatred and incite violence on our streets —
driving the growing radicalisation of young British Muslims that is now
thrown back as a justification for 42 days. 

Mr Brown’s security strategy is the worst of all worlds — draconian,
expensive and ineffective. This contortion of British security and liberty
is the result of pervasive ministerial amateurism, driven by a desperate
thirst for headlines. Policy-making for the news cycle cannot be properly
assessed, checked and tested. That is why I am fighting this by-election.
We need a national debate on the erosion of British liberty in the name of
security — based on a thorough, rigorous and critical assessment of all the
evidence, not a stream of simplistic soundbites.
-- 
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