Pupil Barrister
Protesting in Tahiri Sq, Cairo Egypt. Jan 30 2011. Photo by darkroomproductions on Flickr
Here’s Obama’s speech at Tucson:
The wild applause of the crowd seems slightly odd at times, though that is the case with a lot of political speeches. A full throated approval in the auditorium sounds tinny and inappropriate. Or perhaps it is the presence of younger people in the audience, more comfortable with vocal expression than with the simple clapping of hands.
But the speech is fantastic – an affirmation of free speech and democracy.
“There is not enough poxes for your houses” says Jay Rosen to the pundits discussing #Tucson. Well, here’s an astonishing quote from a non-pundit which goes places no politician dares to tread:
This shouldn’t happen in this country, or anywhere else, but in a free society, we’re going to be subject to people like this. I prefer this to the alternative.
That was spoken by John Green, the father of Christina Green, 9-year-old girl killed at the shootings on Saturday. His statement eloquently explains the tough trade-off between liberty and security. He acknowledges the limits of Government, and that ackowledges that horrible things will happen in a free society, and explicitly says that this is a preferable state of affairs. It is a difficult case to make at the best of times (I have tried on a few occasions, regarding cannabis, ID cards, and other civil liberties). For Mr Green to say it at the depth of his grief is truly courageous.
Compare this to Nick Clegg and David Cameron, who seem to want to have it both ways. If you want to argue for more civil liberties, I think you must acknowledge that the mythological state of absolute security does not exist, that there can be negative consequences to liberty… and that we should all be comfortable with that.
When I read this quote I instinctively assumed it was referring to the idea of liberty in general, and did not think too much about the particular tyoe of liberty that Green was advocating. However, a colleague points out that he can only be referring to gun-control (or lack thereof in the American system). And as many others have been arguing these past few days, liberty and the unfettered ‘right to bear arms’ do not necessarily go hand in hand. Indeed, surely the whole point of consituting a state is to get away from all that! So it is worth adding a line here to emphasise that I do not share Mr Green’s views on gun control, and am relieved that we do not have that sort of ‘liberty’ here in the UK. There’s no point in whitewashing my original post though – I think it best to leave my excesses and embarrasments for all to read.
Having said that, I think my central point remains. Mr Green acknowledges that his ideology has negative aspects, and he embraces them anyway.
The shootings in Tuscon present a difficult conundrum. On the one hand, we cannot seriously suggest that Sarah Palin and the other Tea Party demagogues literally sponsored or otherwise provoked the spree. But on the other, the inflammatory rhetoric of recent American politics has made many people (including myself) very uneasy, and this massacre feels like something expected, inevitable. Jonathan Raban’s column in the Independent today seems to strike the right balance, rightly pointing out that it is the entire discourse and culture that is at fault:
The gunsights were intended as an eye-catching metaphor in the metaphor-stuffed rhetoric of the Tea Party movement, which loves to harp on a fanciful parallel between today’s opposition to healthcare reform, the stimulus package and the bank bailouts, the case for providing amnesty to illegal immigrants, and all the rest, with the great patriotic war of the American Revolution in the 1770s. It’s the sort of historical comparison designed to appeal deeply to people who are ignorant of history, and it generates a stream of metaphors for heroic resistance, involving muskets, funny trousers and tricorn hats.
…
There is a chance, if rather a slim one, that the Tucson massacre will make both politicians and commentators draw back and reconsider their terms. Politics is not warfare. The Democratic party is not a colonialist tyranny. Obama is not George III. To live in a slew of overheated metaphors, in language vastly disproportionate to the occasion, is to invite and license the kind of atrocity that happened the day before yesterday.
Some on America’s extreme right have already begun to hit-back those who have criticised Sarah Palin for the gun-sight imagery she used on a campaigning website during last year’s mid-term elections. But I don’t think this criticism of Palin is cynical. Rather, it is an inelegant erruption of a thousand ‘told you sos’, from all those who have been concerned by the Tea Party’s divisive rhetoric. Explaining why statements like “a second ammendment solution” (Nevada senate candidate Sharon Angle) are dangerous and undemocratic usually takes a fair few paragraphs of historical and political blogging to get right. In the face of an hysterical, pseudo-patriotic libertarian fervour, the more compassionate and reasoned of our American cousins have struggled to articulate a counterpoint. The Arizona shootings are sick and twisted, but they have also made a complex set of ideas seem very simple indeed. A single word, ‘#Tuscon’ will now suffice to refudiate and dampen the more sinister and threatening political rhetoric. A single face will come to symbolise how far the pendulum can swing. This is in itself reductive, however.
Christina Taylor Green. Born on 9/11, murdered in Tuscon Arizona.
I was at the Nick Clegg speech earlier today. He took aim at Labour’s pretty poor record on civil liberties, suggesting that the previous governments were more systematic and less casual than prominent ex-Ministers would have us believe. (Full text of the speech is here).
Although there were some fine words on Libel Reform and some interesting proposals on Freedom of Information, most of the discussion in the speech itself, and in questions afterwards, was on control orders and curfews. Clegg refused to outline how these might change, but did say that those who want to see them abolished completely “will be disappointed”.
There was one phrase that Clegg used which is particularly grating on the ears. This was when he said that there were people who ‘we know’ are planning atrocities, but we do not have the evidence to convict them. It stood out, because David Blunket had used precisely the same formulation during his pre-emptive retort on The Today Programme this morning, and I am sure the current and previous Home Secretaries have taken a similar line.
This line of argument sounds tough, plausible and savvy. The speaker gets to burnish his or her credentials as a realist. However, it is a stance that rests on very shaky moral ground. Control orders are a form of pre-emptive detention, and the argument which justifies them is exactly the same as those used by authoritarian governments around the world, when they detain their political opponents.
Moreover, it is a rude and obvious short-circuit of the very basic legal principles. If a Minister ‘knows’ that someone is a danger, then they should be charged and convicted. If there is not enough evidence to convict, then neither politicians, the police nor the general public get to use the word ‘know’ in their rhetoric. There simply is not the epistemological certainty for that kind of claim, especially not in the context of political arguments. A control order is an extreme form of accusation, and Deputy Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries must not be allowed to make such ‘accusations’ and leave them hanging.
As the Home Secretary conducts her review of control orders in the coming months, look out for examples of this rhetoric, “we know, but we cannot convict.” It is a half-formed argument, a question not an answer. It is a cowardly fudge for those who do not want to make the tough decision: do we let these suspects go, or do we allow phone-tapping evidence to be admissable in court? This is the issue at stake, and the phenomenon of control orders is simply a clever device for punting the decision. If Nick Clegg is really serious about restoring civil liberties to British citizens, then he and his Prime Minister need to stop using bad rhetoric, and start making tough choices.
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