Arbitrary Authority Cannot Be Accepted!

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David Blunkett in India:
Arbitrary Authority Cannot Be Accepted!

Speaking in Amritsar, India, during his recent six-day tour of that country and Pakistan, Home Secretary David Blunkett announced his intention to launch new attacks on basic rights in Britain. The Home Secretary was speaking in a city where in 1919 Britain's colonial regime massacred some 1,000 innocent Punjabi men, women and children and injured three times that number. At that time there were uprisings against British colonialism all over north and north-west India. Over 15,000 people were protesting that day near the Golden Temple, which Blunkett also visited, against draconian laws, detention without trial and attacks on fundamental rights by the British colonialists. Can in be just coincidental that Home Secretary Blunkett chose Amritsar to declare that in Britain in 2004 the Labour government plans to introduce secret trials presided over by "security vetted" judges, in which the defendants would be represented by state-appointed, "security-vetted" lawyers who along with their clients would not be able to see all the evidence against them? What message is he trying to convey both to the people of India, particularly Punjab, and the working class and people of this country, including the national minority communities?

            The proposals, which Blunkett said would be published in a consultation document later in February, would also lower the balance of proof necessary for conviction from "beyond all reasonable doubt" to "on the balance of probabilities". Attempting to justify his proposed measures, Blunkett declared, "We have to have prevention under a new category which is to intervene before the act is committed, rather than do so by due process after the act is committed when it's too late". With these words taking up the Bush doctrine of “pre-emption”, Blunkett made it plain that the government's aim is to smash "due legal process" and the "rule of law" itself and replace it with unlimited and arbitrary state power reminiscent of Europe's medieval monarchs, under which anyone can be arrested and convicted on the basis of "secret evidence" from the "intelligence services" before they have "committed the act". This is precisely at the time when “intelligence” evidence has been so discredited, whether “faulty” or just plain invented, having been put into the spotlight with the Hutton Report. David Blunkett is proposing that evidence gathered to support the crown’s case would not be disclosed to the defendants, under the pretext that it is necessary to protect secret intelligence sources. And the case would be heard by a security-vetted judge and government-appointed defence counsel, without a jury, it goes without saying. The people of the north of Ireland have had bitter experience of such courts, known as the Diplock Courts, over which non other than Lord Hutton himself presided.

            David Blunkett has announced these proposals and declared that he wants them on the statute books before the next election, even while the Civil Contingencies Bill is going through Parliament and within a short space of the passing into law of the Terrorism Act 2000 and the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001. Under the latter Act, Britain has created its own domestic Guantanamo Bay where 14 foreign citizens have been imprisoned for the last two years without charge or trial.  It clearly shows that unless the rights of all are defended, the attacks on vulnerable and marginalised groups become the springboard for launching attacks on everyone.

            David Blunkett's announcement in India is part of the Labour government's strategy for bringing in increasingly oppressive legislation. As Labour peer Helena Kennedy QC pointed out, this strategy is based on the idea that "you suggest all kinds of outrageous and awful things because then you get away with half of them". This enshrining in legislation of arbitrary power in contempt of the rule of law which the Labour government is engineering under the banner of the "war on terror" is the inevitable outcome of its neo-liberal, “Third Way” course of imperialist wars and aggression abroad coupled with ever more reactionary attacks on people's basic rights within Britain. The working class and people must unite in action to defeat these measures, which are an attack on the whole polity.