EcoLogics

Updated 24 November 2009 (scroll the bottom of the post to see latest updates)

If you read this article in the Independent, you might come away feeling relieved that the great tide of authoritarianism that has characterised New Labour’s years in power is starting to ebb. Under the headline “Ministers cancel ‘Big Brother’ database”, the paper says that ‘Plans to store information about every phone call, email and internet visit in the United Kingdom have in effect been abandoned by the Government’, and that the decision to postpone further legislation could be ‘to kill off the plans for years.’

If, however, you read the Telegraph (which you really shouldn’t), a rather different picture emerges. Under the headline “State to ’spy’ on every phone call, email and web search’, that paper suggests that

All telecoms companies and internet service providers will be required by law to keep a record of every customer’s personal communications, showing who they have contacted, when and where, as well as the websites they have visited.[...] Despite widespread opposition to the increasing amount of surveillance in Britain, 653 public bodies will be given access to the information, including police, local councils, the Financial Services Authority, the ambulance service, fire authorities and even prison governors.[...] They will not require the permission of a judge or a magistrate to obtain the information, but simply the authorisation of a senior police officer or the equivalent of a deputy head of department at a local authority.

Which version of events is the correct one? EcoLogics suspects that both papers are right. New Labour probably has decided to shelve plans for a single database, reluctantly realising that it’s a vote looser. Senior New Labour politicians must be having quiet talks with Entrust and other digital security corporations, explaining that they’re very sorry but it isn’t feasible to deliver the promised contracts, at least not yet. At the same time, the politicians will be explaining to Britain’s increasingly deliberative security services that the single database isn’t that great a loss because the information will be there, awaiting to be used, in the databases of private corporations like BT or Virgin. Now isn’t that reassuring?

Even as the two papers make headlines on this subject, if you read the BBC news, you will find out that good ‘ole Jack Straw has got his way with New Labour plans to replace public enquiries with secret inquests. The conclusion has to be that, if anything, that tide of New Labour authoritarianism is in full flow.

By the way, the ‘Part II’ in the title of this post is a reference to the earlier The New Labour Modus Operandi.

Update 24 November 2009: The news media are devoting headlines to the fact that a former police officer has denounced the police for deliberately arresting people in order to obtain their DNA, a policy which is not only illegal, but has had the effect of increasing the proportion of DNA samples taken from ethnic minorities, relative to their actual numbers in civil society. For an account of this practice, which would confirm the existence of a New Labour-Police conspiracy to introduce a universal DNA sample by the back door, see this Reuters account.

In some of this blog’s very first posts (see A Social Ecology of the Buccal Swab, or McNulty’s Genie), EcoLogics described the role that former Minister for Policing Tony McNulty played in sneaking in New Labour’s de facto universal DNA database policy. In ‘A Social Ecology of the Buccal Swab; or, When Gattaca came to the UK’, EcoLogics compared the near-future science fiction film Gattaca with the reality of the UK’s then-present political culture:

Gattaca’s future, imagined in our own past, is arguably New Labour’s present. In March [2007], its Home Office produced a document with a magnificently unthreatening title (‘Modernising Police Powers: Review of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) 1984’). The document nonetheless paves the way for what might well be described as the Gattacaization of the UK. The document has been put on the internet by statewatch.org(1), and arguably provides a good example of New Labour’s political stealth technologies, a modus operandi that this blog describes in some detail in The New Labour Modus Operandi. One of the ‘suggested areas for consideration’ in Chapter 3 concerns ‘Biometric information and identification procedures’. This section raises the prospect of universal DNA ‘sampling’, to be applied even for what it describes as ‘so-called minor offences’. However, it does so rather elliptically:

‘3.33 The absence of the ability to take fingerprints etc in relation to all offences may be considered to undermine the value and purpose of having the ability to confirm or disprove identification and, importantly, to make checks on a searchable database aimed at detecting existing and future offending and protecting the public. There have been notable successes particularly through the use of the DNA database in bringing offenders to justice.

3.34 Is there scope to populate identification databases and remove unnecessary operational constraints on the extent to which police are able to use fingerprints etc. to prevent, detect and investigate crime?’(2)

That little ‘etc.’ may well be the most loaded etc. in the history of UK policing legislation. A number of commentators have noted how the proposed policy erodes civil liberties to the point that it may well complete the UK’s transformation into what the London Editor of Vanity Fair has reluctantly described as a ‘Police State’.

[...]

Who is behind this proposal? It is, undoubtedly, a part of the New Labour lurch to the right that began as soon as Tony Blair took office, but which looks set to continue under Gordon Brown. EcoLogics is nonetheless interested to note that there is one person who has presented, signed, and fronted photographically the document, but who has so far avoided the media spotlight. That person is Tony McNulty, the UK’s Minister of State for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing, and whose pictures on the Policing document and in the official government website make him look eerily like a character in Gattaca.According to the ‘TheyWorkForYou.com’ website, McNulty has voted ‘very strongly against a transparent parliament’,‘very strongly for introducing ID cards’, ‘very strongly for introducing Foundation [quasi-privatized] hospitals’, ‘very strongly for introducing student top-up fees’[arguably the beginning of the privatization of higher education in the UK], ‘very strongly for Labour’s anti-terrorism laws’, ‘very strongly for the Iraq war’ and ‘very strongly for replacing Trident’[and so for a £20 billion nuclear sub replacement]. If TheyWorkForYou.com is to be believed, McNulty is, from the New Labour point of view, a very safe pair of hands.

Returning to [Henry] Porter’s suggestion that there should be a warning in neon across every town centre, perhaps that warning should come with a name, and should also be placed above the STHF’s (‘short term holding facilities’) that McNulty wants to put into shopping malls, and which will be one of the sites where our DNA samples are to be taken. That name could be ‘the Gattaca Law’, or perhaps, the ‘McNulty Act’.

Today we read that Mr McNulty himself has now admitted publicly to having committed an act that ought to land a cotton swab in his cheek (for the purpose of a DNA sample of the kind he was intent on making everyone else take), and the rest of his body in a long term holding facility, that is to say, in jail. McNulty is one of the many MPs who helped himself to state money when he thought no one was watching. He did so to the tune of more than £13000 in expenses which he claimed against his parents’ home.

Will McNulty actually get his cheek swabbed? Will he actually get taken to a long term holding facility? Of course not. We can only take comfort from the thought that the House of Commons may well prove to be a short-term ‘holding facility’ for this and other corrupt New Labour politicians. If voters know what’s good for them, this man will be out of Westminister by May 2010.

New Labour cannot evade responsibility for the rise in the popularity of the BNP. Amongst New Labour politicians, Jack Straw is perhaps the man who has most blatantly dipped his political spoon into the BNP’s broth of racist and xenophobic hatred; his infamous, easy go at women who wear veils was a textbook example of the kind of intervention that aids and abets ethnocentrism of an extremist kind. Almost overnight, some of the women most likely to be abused in the UK were transformed by Straw into ‘perpetrators’ of multiculturalism.

Straw is also the éminence grise behind Britain’s scandalous libel laws. And as if that weren’t enough, just yesterday it was reported that Straw has been caught out trying to sneak through a new law that makes it possible for the government to conduct secret inquests.

In this context, it was contradictory, to say the least, to hear that New Labour’s most right-handed man would be in charge of ’standing up’ to the neo-nazis during the BBC’s Nick Griffin Comes to Question Time special. Alas, interviewees on this morning’s Radio 4 Today programe reported that Straw looked distinctly uncomfortable in that role; he would do, given his politics.

EcoLogics is happy to point readers in the direction of two excellent pieces by commentators who tell the Jack Straw story like it is.

The first, by Gary Young, sets the scene with a piece that appears, lamentably, in Peter Mandelson’s rag, better known as The Guardian. But a friend has forwarded it and here is an excerpt (perhaps Young might find another paper to write in!):

The issue of whether the BNP should be given this kind of airtime has been debated extensively elsewhere in these pages. But there is little doubt that once the BNP is on Question Time, Jack Straw – or indeed anyone in the New Labour hierarchy – is in no position to take the fight to it. The same is true for most of the rest of the British political establishment that will be represented on the panel – they have either actively colluded or passively acquiesced in the political trajectory of the past decade. [...] But it is no accident that this happened on New Labour’s watch and no small irony that Jack Straw should set himself up as Griffin’s opponent.[...] Economically, its neoliberal policies have resulted in growing insecurity, rising unemployment, child poverty and inequality that have alienated the poor and made the middle class feel vulnerable. Politically, its lies over the war, stewardship of the expenses scandal and internal bickering have produced widespread cynicism with our political culture. The ramifications of its role in the war on terror in general, and Iraq in particular, were to elevate fear of a racialised “other” to a matter of life and death at home. “Terror is first of all the terror of the next attack,” explains Arjun Appadurai, in Fear of Small Numbers. “Terror … opens the possibility that anyone may be a soldier in disguise, a sleeper among us, waiting to strike at the heart of our social slumber.”

From Gary Young’s  ‘When you watch the BNP on TV, just remember: Jack Straw started all this’ in The Guardian.

The one thing we can be sure Mr Straw believes in is Mr Straw. His ambition is unquenchable. When his one serious mistake (deflecting transatlantic glory from Mr Tony Blair by cuddling up to Condi Rice) cost him the Foreign Office, he accepted humiliating demotion just to stay in the game. His transfer of allegiance from Blair to Brown, whose leadership “campaign” he managed (and hats off for winning that one), was comical in its fervency. Even now, be sure that he is scheming to position himself as the Jim Hacker compromise candidate should Labour somehow locate the energy required to ditch the PM.[...]Tragically, there would be worse electoral choices. …he is adept at promoting an image of calmly authoritative blandness, hence his comparative popularity, and a grandmaster of televisual smoothness. He is as slimy as an oil slick, and always quick to move on once he’s coated the vulnerable birdies with filthy tar.

The following is an excerpt of a post published by George Monbiot about Sir David Eady, a judge of the Queen’s Bench Division, whom Monbiot describes as Britain’s legal censor. EcoLogics publishes it in solidarity with Monbiot and all those—the Murdochs, Rothmeres and other home-grown or imported oligarchs excepted—who are finding themselves on the receiving end of Britain’s extraordinarily repressive libel laws. To read the full blog, go to monbiot.com to ‘The Hanging Judge‘.

“During the libel case brought by Richard Desmond, pornographer and proprietor of Express newspapers, against the investigative author Tom Bower, who had claimed that Desmond acted on grudges, Eady refused to allow the court to hear evidence that he had done just this in another instance. In July, the appeal court found that Eady’s decision was “plainly wrong” and risked “a miscarriage of justice”(5). In 2004, during a case brought by a Saudi businessman, Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, against the Wall Street Journal, Eady decided that the newspaper’s story that the Saudi central bank was monitoring the accounts of certain businesses in case they were being used (unwittingly or otherwise) to channel funds to terrorists was not responsible journalism(6). Among his justifications was the fact that the US government hadn’t published this information: Eady appeared to see the interests of the state and the interest of the public as the same thing(7).

The law lords decided that Eady was “hostile to the spirit” of the public interest defence and that he had “rigidly applied the old law” in a way that was “quite unrealistic … unnecessary and positively misleading”. In one amazing passage, Lord Hoffmann compared Eady’s approach to that of the Communist Party censors in the Soviet Union(8).

But perhaps the gravest judgements against the Honourable Mr Justice Eady are those made by legislators in the United States. Such is the reach and severity of his illiberal rulings that four states have so far passed what are, in effect, Eady laws(9), and Congress is currently considering a federal bill whose purpose is to defend US citizens from his judgements, and the English law he interprets. The Eady laws arise from his encouragement of libel tourism: allowing cases with only the most tenuous connection with this country to be heard in London, and using them to stamp on free speech all over the world.”

Here’s the funny thing about Eady: according to the Daily Telegraph,

Surprising as it may now seem, Mr Justice Eady was once a leading courtroom defender of red-top journalism, much in demand as a barrister who could be relied on to uphold the freedom of the tabloids to expose the private lives of public figures. It was to David Eady that the Sun newspaper turned when the Coronation Street actor Bill Roache sued over taunts that he was “boring”.

This is EcoLogics’ contribution to Monbiot’s denunciation: how extraordinary that, in a country that is almost second to none when it comes to Rottweiler journalism, with oligarchs such as Rupert Murdoch routinely employing their newspapers to attack uncooperative politicians, or simply to make money by publishing pedling celebrity tat, we have the most draconian press law in the so-called ‘free’ world.

It might be argued that this is precisely the reason why we have these laws. In fact, given the nature of British political culture, it is usually only the rich, and apparently especially the rich on the political right, that can use the law to silence newspapers, and defend their interests. This means that, far from being in the public interest, the law as it stands serves to undermine democracy. According to Monbiot, a key defender of the status quo has been Jack Straw, who as Justice Minister has blocked attempts to reform the libel laws.

The worst offender when it comes to rottweiler journalism is Italy—or rather, Berlusconi’s press. Have a look at this press item, published by Reuters, which reveals that Berlusconi is having one of his TV channels shadow and secretly film a judge who has ruled against the prime Minister in a bribery case. ‘Days after Judge Raimondo Mesiano ordered Berlusconi’s holding company to pay 750 million euros in damages to a rival, the media mogul’s Canale 5 channel aired a video of the judge taking a walk, smoking and getting a shave at the barber. Dubbing the judge’s behaviour “eccentric”, a narrator points to him smoking the “umpteenth” cigarette, calls his turquoise socks “strange” and says: “He’s impatient … he can only relax at the barber’s”.

A remarkable experiment in public nudity—and the invasion of one’s most private space—is happening at Manchester Airport, in northern England. The experiment is being carried out by Manchester City Airports Group Plc (‘MAG’), a holding company owned by the ten metropolitan borough councils of Greater Manchester.

The experiment involves inviting you to go through an x-ray machine that will, in effect, take your clothes off, ostensibly to spare you the embarrassment of being ‘patted down’ when you go through airport security. An officer that you can’t see, sitting in an office at one remove from the booth where you will be stripped, will then be able to see all of you.

The mainstream media are being very careful not to show the detail in which your breasts, penis or vulva will be visible, but have no doubt: you will effectively be stripped naked by the Manchester Airport x-ray machine, and you are being asked to believe that the images will be anonymous, and not subject to any kind of manipulation, publication, or exploitation (As if we hadn’t heard that before…)

The quid pro quo—the ‘exchange’—is based on the following formula: you willingly take your clothes off—or rather, we take them off for you—and we (the airport security guards, but more generally, the Manchester City Airports Group Plc) won’t touch you.

Sound perverse? It is, and EcoLogics will have a lot more to say about it, soon. In the meantime, vote with your feet, or rather, your itinerary: avoid Manchester Airport.

Who is behind New Labour’s sweeping policies?

It is well known that New Labour won the last elections (in 2005) with a drastically reduced majority: the party won no new seats, and its share of the popular vote fell by 5%. What is less well known is that only about 9.5 million people voted for New Labour (EcoLogics uses the expression ‘New Labour’ deliberately), which means that the party has governed over the last four years with a mandate based on about 22% of all those who could have voted (it is calculated that at 27 million, turnout was about 61%, which means that some 44 million people could have voted).

While the popular mandate for New Labour was not always as low as this, Britain’s extraordinarily undemocratic first-past-the-post parliamentary system means that New Labour has never actually represented a majority of Britons. Yet we have seen the scale of New Labour’s transformation of our everyday lives: beyond getting us involved in two wars, one of which was illegal and the other which is now supported by less than half of the population, New Labour has engaged in a reformist project whose privatising zeal, panoptical logic, and gross economic mismanagement are unmatched by that of any other postwar government.

Privatising zeal: even as New Labour has poured money into certain public services, it has engaged in a far-reaching policy of full or partial, and often covert privatisations. From city academies to foundation hospitals, the selling off of Royal Mail’s most lucrative aspects to the outsourcing of Job Centre Plus activities, New Labour has fatally undermined the old Labour principle that some services must remain in the public sector in order to prevent greedy corporations from exploiting the most vulnerable groups. Even in those cases where some public sector agencies nominally remain under public control, they have been reorganised as de facto private sector businesses if only because their practices have been made to obey markets, and not a public service ethos. The BBC is but one example of this process, and Higher Education is increasingly another. If there is one thing that New Labour has done astutely, it’s the manner in which it has literally poured money, ostensibly for the public sector, into the coffers of private firms: the complaints about millions given to private consultants are only the tip of the iceberg.

Panoptical logic: New Labour’s laws have given virtually all public sector, and part-privatised government agencies the power to spy, almost at will, on any aspect of our private lives. Any of us can now be thrown into jail and kept there for the longest period of time in any industrialised democracy, without charges or due process. As I have explained in a series of posts about New Labour’s Spiral of Terror, the true justification for these extraordinary changes is not, as is widely believed, to be found in 9/11 and subsequent attacks; to name just one example, the RIPA 2000 legislation was developed before 9/11, but it is this legislation, as amended by David Blunkett, that now even gives town councils the right to spy on people who allow their dogs to fowl the country’s streets and parks. Anyone familiar with the history of governance must know that unpopular governments, or governments without a true mandate, have typically resorted to brute force, or at least, some form of policing coercion, and New Labour is no exception to this rule. Perhaps its one claim to innovation is the extent to which it has relied on a panoptical logic to secure its interests. However, as the crisis over the G20 policing demonstrated, it may now be the case that this same logic is being applied against the police by camera-wielding activists. And if the crisis in parliamentary standards revealed anything beyond the expected conflation of public and private interests, it was that MPs own privacy is now under threat. The proverbial chickens have finally come home to roost in Westminster itself.

Gross economic mismanagement: we should be thankful that the Tories are not in power just now, because they would be busy slashing and burning public services as per the older, less astute Thatcherite model, and this at precisely the moment when massive state investment is required to keep us from sliding into an economic depression. But this verity must not allow us to overlook the fact that it was New Labour’s incestuous relationship with London City financiers that got us into the economic pickle in the first place. Blair, Brown and their acolytes have fallen, and are still falling heads over heels to please especially the big financial corporations; little wonder that Blair landed plum jobs as an ‘adviser’ with J P Morgan and with Zurich, and that Gordon Brown (and the Obama administration) have just managed to stop any efforts on the part of France and Germany to cap bankers’ bonuses. Will Brown also cash in when he’s gone? And has Mandelson done so already?

All of this, and much, much more on the basis of an electoral mandate that is nowhere near a majority of the popular vote. Who then, or what, gives New Labour the right to engage in these far-reaching changes?

New Labour’s policies are almost certainly the result of a complex mixture of highly centralised decision-making, and some local input via direct and indirect consultation processes. While there is evidence that some of the policies are the result of long-term planning, others are the result of purely tactical decision-making, frequently in response to a media panic, or a tabloid attack. As always, it would be a mistake to assume that there is one big conspiracy at work. I nevertheless suggest that there are three forces that have more than taken up the slack of meaningful democratic participation in the UK, and are responsible for many aspects of the changes outlined above.

The first of these involves the media, with two groups—Murdoch’s News Corporation, and Jonathan Harmsworth’s (aka the 4th Viscount Rothermere) Daily Mail and General Trust—leading the proverbial pack. The process that began at least as far back as the time when Murdoch bought the Sun and transformed it into a Thatcherite rottweiler has had extraordinarily important implications for politics in the UK. Murdoch—or rather, now the Murdochs—have reached a position of such political power that they may even be king- or queenmakers. Little wonder that prospective party leaders from Blair onwards have been so eager to secure meetings with Rupert Murdoch, frequently in far away places. From European policy to economic practice, from the spying on people (as in the case of the News of the World) to the promotion of the idea of permanent insecurity, the Murdochs and the Rothermeres have doubtless played a huge role in promoting the kind of political culture we have in Britain today.

The second force is made up of other powerful private sector corporations without access to the public forms of pressure brought to bear by the Murdochs or the Rothermeres. Some of these are huge transnational conglomerates like the Royal Bank of Scotland or BAE, companies which have the power quite literally to stop government action in its tracks (as was the case with the Serious Fraud Office’s decision to ‘discontinue’ its investigation into BAE corruption) or to bend it in the direction of one or two directors’ personal interests (Fred Goodwin’s pension agreement comes to mind, despite New Labour’s strenuous efforts to persuade us that its hands were tied).

Many other corporations may engage in less spectacular interventions, but their practices may have equally nefarious consequences for public policy. Here EcoLogics has in mind for example the role that Entrust may have played, and may still be playing via David Blunkett in policy matters involving centralised, all-encompassing databases such as the proposed ID card scheme. Or consider, for another example, what happened to the UK’s adult education policy, thanks in part to the relationship between New Labour and the failed automotive repair company turned adult education provider, Carter & Carter. As EcoLogics has noted in several other posts, Carter & Carter attempted to gain a foothold in higher education by way of a partnership with Howard Newby, the former vice-chancellor of UWE who is now vice-chancellor at Liverpool University and has tried to close down progressive departments such as philosophy and politics.

We might also point to Bridgepoint Capital, the £13 billion private equity firm which has been recently associated with Alan Milburn, a former New Labour hopeful for party leadership who is now widely believed to represent private interests in the context of so-called NHS ‘reform’. And let us not forget Capita, which is perhaps the most infamous of the New Labour corporate darlings. Capita controls the television licence fee (the operation of which has made headlines thanks to Capita’s brutal enforcement procedures); the management of call centres for government initiatives such as the London Congestion Charge; the provision of IT services, including web hosting and helpdesk support, to many county and city councils, many LEAs, as well as the Driving Standards Agency and National Rail; the management of the Criminal Records Bureau for the Home Office;  SIMS.net, the School Information Management Software which is used in virtually all primary and secondary schools across the UK in order to record many aspects of student data… the list goes on and on, and is derived from the Capita Wikipedia entry, which is worth a read. Beyond the scary concentration of private information in the hands of one private corporation, the Capita Wiki illustrates the point made earlier about the not-so-overt privatisation, via the figure of ‘outsourcing’, of a host of public service activities. Lest we forget, Capita first came to public notice when its CEO Rod Aldridge had to resign over the New Labour ‘cash-for-peerages’ affair, a scandal which confirmed the extent to which the New Labour’s party-economic fortunes hinged on political favours. EcoLogics says ‘confirmed’ because of course, the Ecclestone Affair provided the first glimpse of this reality. (By way of an aside, does Aldridge still have a stake in Capita?)

Beyond these especially big fish, it is difficult to know how many additional corporations are involved in what aspects of government on what level, and how many act in concert, or on the contrary, compete with each other for influence. It is also difficult to assess, given the behind-the-scenes nature of their interventions, the extent to which such corporations must vie with more local interests when they attempt to shape New Labour’s policies. We have seen, for example, how easy it will apparently be for Tesco to get around local wishes in Machynlleth.

EcoLogics nonetheless suspects that the group of most influential corporations is actually rather smaller than expected, and involves a great deal of collaboration, to not say economic and political incestuousness. Part of what allowed Carter & Carter to grow in the spectacular way that it did prior to its CEO’s death was an injection of capital from Bridgepoint. At the same time, the skills policy that Carter & Carter would have benefited from was authored by Lord Sandy Leitch, one of the Lloyds Banking Group’s leading directors, who in turn is said to have given money towards Gordon Brown’s virtual leadership campaign. Brown, for his part, looked the other way in regard to questions regarding competition law when Lloyds embarked in its fateful takeover of HBOS. It is, in this sense, not difficult to imagine that, as the title of this post suggests, New Labour’s world is in some respects rather smaller, or at least rather more tightly knit, than one might have thought, and thus perhaps rather more precarious than many might assume. What would happen if any of these players (or one of their employees) were to blow the whistle on the New Labour government?

That said, a third source of policy influence—and support— takes the form of the intervention of foreign governments, with the U.S. doing most of the backseat driving. Few people realise the extent to which U.S. foreign policy, and the interests of its different political and business groups, dictate Britain’s international and even national affairs. Few people know, for example, that the U.S. military would have to both approve, and do the targeting for any use of our much-vaunted Trident missile system. And there can be little doubt that it was the U.S. that forced Tony Blair to walk down the Iraqi War gangplank; this is something that he will of course always deny because it would show his true stature in the world. But how else to explain that a leader of the Labour Party (in fact, New Labour Party) could ignore the extraordinary two-million person march which occurred in London on February 15, 2003? One gets a sense of the sheer scale of the march when one learns that, on that bitterly cold day, people had to queue for hours just to be able to join the massive anti-war march. Hundreds of thousands of people were jammed on bridges and side roads, still trying to begin the march, even as several hundred thousand more were reaching the end of the route. Alas, as we now know, a deal had already been done, and Tony Blair felt powerless to stop it despite the fact that he must have known, as the Bush administration itself already suspected, that it might well finish off his political career.

The above is, without a doubt, an overly simplistic analysis. But it begins to explain why anyone who claims that we have a solid, and healthy democracy in Britain is deceiving themselves. It is, in this sense, richly ironic that the New Labour government recently felt able to institute direct rule in the Turks and Caicos Islands, ostensibly on account of the corruption of the island state’s ’suspended’ government. The UK’s acting prime minister—the man who has had himself called the First Secretary of State, President of the Board of Trade and Lord President of the Council (EcoLogics returns to Wikipedia)—has previously been forced to resign not once, but twice from the UK’s cabinet thanks to conflicts of interest involving British and Indian millionaires (or perhaps it is billionaires). In such a context, one does not accuse other states of corruption. Or perhaps, that is exactly what one does.

In a post published in 2007, EcoLogics noted that panopticism involves a form of power that is embodied in a ‘principle of construction’ proposed in the late 18th century by Jeremy Bentham. Bentham, a philosopher and social reformer, conceived a radically new way of keeping persons of ‘any kind of description’ ‘under inspection’. The ‘Panopticon’, to be used in ‘prisons, houses of industry, work-houses, poor-houses, lazarettos, manufactories, hospitals, mad-houses and schools’, was to be a building in the form of a ring with a watchtower in its centre. The ring was to be divided into cells which extended across the entire width of the building; the cells were to have windows at either end. A guard, or as Bentham called him, an ‘inspector’ would be located in the tower, and would maintain the cells under surveillance. While the guard might not be able to watch all of the cells all the time, his eye should be attracted to any activity thanks to the backlighting of each cell. This principle would still apply at night thanks to the use of specially designed lamps with reflectors.

Bentham shows how carefully he had thought through the psychology of the design when he says that

‘To save the troublesome exertion of voice that might otherwise be necessary, and to prevent one prisoner from knowing that the inspector was occupied by another prisoner at a distance, a small tin tube might reach from each cell to the inspector’s lodge, passing across the area, and so in at the side of the correspondent window of the lodge. By means of this implement, the slightest whisper of the one might be heard by the other, especially if he had proper notice to apply his ear to the tube.’(1)

Key to the idea of the Panopticon was the use of an asymmetrical form of visibility—observing without being observed, but also (not) observing whilst being thought to observe. As noted famously by Michel Foucault, the effect of the Panopticon was

‘to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.’(2)

*    *    *

Now that the scandal of Westminster’s expense-charging schemes has erupted, it is interesting to note the extent of the panoptical asymmetry of our times.  New Labour, with David Blunkett, Jacqui Smith and Hazel Blears fronting the process, has arguably done more than any other party in recent British history to introduce panoptical systems designed to police, at a distance, virtually any and every aspect of our lives. As noted by the previous EcoLogics post, the New Labour government now treats us as de facto criminals-in-the-making. On the basis of this Hobbesian logic, party leaders like Charles Clarke argue that it is necessary to introduce all manner of systems in which to engage in general, and targetted surveillance: EcoLogics has in mind systems such as the DNA database, a digital ID card, and RIPA 2000 more generally.

Yet even as such systems have been overtly or covertly introduced, leading members of New Labour have been busy engaging in private practices that make it starkly apparent that they themselves do not feel, or thus far have not felt under, panoptical surveillance. Blunkett felt able, despite the evident conflict of interest, to join Entrust, a company that sells the kind of digital systems required to spy on people by means of the ID cards he was pushing as Home Office Secretary. Jacqui Smith has continued Blunkett’s assault on our civil liberties even as she has charged an assortment of the most personal of her expenses to the state. Blears, who was herself once a policing minister, has a voting record second to none on the ‘war on terror’. As Communities and Local Government minister she has played an active role in promoting fear (for an interesting take on her specific role, see the post by Craig Murray on her feigned ignorance about events in Uzbekistan). Yet even as she has been adopting this hard right-wing stance, we now know that she has been engaging in activities that have transformed her into something like a professional property speculator at the expense of the state.

One can choose to regard the co-incidence of the two sets of events as just that—as no more than coincidence. Then again, one can regard them as being a matter of a systemic logic: the structural nature of the New Labour government’s corruption is that it employs panopticism on others to try to generate as much freedom as possible for themselves. This is not so much a matter of personal ‘design’ (though in some cases there has clearly been an intent to deceive) as it is of a social logic that is at least as old as Bentham’s proposal. People—not least, journalists—cowering at the thought of somehow being accused or ‘found out’ by a panoptical security apparatus are rather less likely to investigate the corruption of a government. In this as in so many other spheres, it seems likely that the real targets of panopticism are not so much the mythical ‘average man or woman on the street’, let alone the criminals with the knowledge to circumvent the surveillance, as individuals or social groups who feel aggrieved enough to contemplate engaging in one or another form of political activism.

From this perspective, it makes perfect sense that Downing Street sicked the anti-terror police on Damian Green and his mole in the name of ‘national security’: for New Labour, national security is precisely a matter of the kind of the panoptical system that is now collapsing around the party. The state–which is to say the state as New Labour requires it–is in danger of being fatally undermined in so far as it is now the politicians that are feeling watched. However momentarily, the asymmetry has been inverted, and it is now ‘the people’, via the less than disinterested press, that are doing the watching.

Note, though, that in the process, panopticism itself becomes more and more ingrained, rather than becoming the subject of more intense scrutiny in its own right. Until the latter happens, things can only get worse for us all. Alas, this is potentially a never-ending spiral of surveillance, whereby increasingly, being a part of a state is a matter of becoming a member of that increasingly universal category, Homo panopticans: even as we are all watched, we are all encouraged to become ‘watchers’. The  watchtower is now truly within.

Notes

1) J. Bentham, ‘Panopticon; or the Inspection-House’ in The Panopticon Writings, Ed. By Miran Bozovic (London, 1995), and reproduced in http://www.cartome.org/panopticon2.htm, accessed September 4, 2007.
2) emphasis added. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (NY: Vintage Books 1995) p. 196. For a longer quotation, see http://www.cartome.org/foucault.htm, accessed September 4, 2007.

…What we’ve found is that since keeping DNA of people who have been arrested … at some time in the future it’s been found that those people do go on to commit further crime or some of the DNA is found at another crime scene
–Vernon Coaker, New Labour Minister for Policing, Crime and Security, speaking on the BBC’s Today programme

This morning we’ve seen BBC newsmaking at its worst and at its best (or at least, at a high level of journalistic competence). Unsurprisingly, the trigger for both situations has been New Labour’s effort to institute one of its most draconian measures, a de facto universal DNA database (let us be very clear that that continues to be the New Labour ideal).

The BBC at its worst: when EcoLogics checked the BBC News online early this morning, this was the headline in response to New Labour efforts to circumvent the European Court of Human Rights:

BBC and New Labour

The government has not said it will ‘wipe the DNA profiles of innocent people’. It has said that it will remove them after 6, or 12 years, depending on the nature of the crime. This is a classic example of bad journalism—journalism that so slavishly sticks to an announcement that it is seriously misleading. A textbook case, if ever there was one, of why objectivity in news reporting is not a matter of simply repeating what somebody else says. While the overall article does make some reference to criticism of the policy, the crucial headline–what many readers will simply glance at—could almost have been written by a New Labour apparatchik. EcoLogics wonders what editorial process led to this representation of events, and at what level of the BBC hierarchy a decision was taken to effectively back the government’s position.

*   *   *

By contrast, there was some good journalism during the Today programme’s (Radio 4) interview with Vernon Coaker (New Labour’s new Tony McNulty), and Shami Chakrabarti.

EcoLogics says the new Tony McNulty, but actually, Coaker is rather easier to interview because he does not seem as cleverly devious as McNulty was when he was the minister of policing (see for example, the EcoLogics post titled McNulty’s Genie). On the contrary, during the interview with John Humphrys, Coaker succeeded in stating the real New Labour position, which is tantamount to getting it seriously wrong for any member of the current government: (as in past transcriptions, EcoLogics tries to include what linguists describe as ‘hesitation phenomena’, i.e. the ah’s and erms of presenters and interviewees)

Humphrys: But if someone’s innocent… how will keeping their DNA database [sic] help you solve crime?
Coaker: Because we know that if somebody is arrested say for a serious and violent offence, then we’ll keep it for 12 years and we know that many of those people will go on to reoffend and…
Humphrys: Hang on! Go on to reoffend? But if they haven’t offended already, if they’re innocent, by definition, they haven’t offended…
Coaker: No, but what I’m saying is that if you keep the DNA of someone who is arrested ah for an offence, a serious and violent offence, or a more minor offence, if you keep that ah, that DNA, you’ve got that intelligence available to you, and what we’ve found is that since keeping ah DNA of ah of people who have been arrested in the fu ah at some time in the future it’s been found that those people do go on to commit further crime or some of the DNA is found at another crime scene [unclear because Humphrys interrupts] … you can use the DNA to match that with the DNA you’ve kept.

Humphrys: But again, you use the expression further crime. We’re talking here about innocent people, and ehem, I can only repeat because I’m deeply puzzled by this, by definition if they’re innocent they haven’t committed a crime, so they can’t commit a further crime…

Coaker realises his mistake and reverts to what was clearly his default position: to establish a link between apprehending criminals, and keeping the DNA database. It is, however, almost too late: the cat has been let out of the bag in the sense that it is clear that the real New Labour position is that everyone is guilty until proven innocent if they are so much as accused of committing a crime by the police. This is, in fact, the logic of a police state. Full stop.

As Humphrys goes on to note,

Humphrys: ‘Right so we’re actually then, we’re making the assumption, aren’t we, that the presumption of innocence doesn’t actually hold… what we’re saying is yeah, you were nicked, ah, you went through the process, you were found not guilty, but actually, the system regards you as being a potential criminal  (rapist, terrorist, whatever it happens to be) because you’ve been arrested in the first place. It doesn’t sound like justice…
Coaker: Well, what what it does is to say that the intelligence that you can gather from people who are arrested means that you have a database with which you can compare DNA samples which are taken from crime scenes, match them, and what that then does is enable you to bring to justice people who would otherwise have got away with the crime and indeed given victims of crime the justice that they seek.

Throughout the interview, Coaker repeats the word ‘intelligence’ over and over again. It’s a matter for speculation whether this, too, is what he was briefed to say, or whether it was simply an unselfconscious reversion to a discourse that reveals, as it does, the extent to which government policy is now indistinct from policing: in effect, New Labour now treats any encounter with the police as an opportunity to ‘gather intelligence’, i.e. spy on people, and keep the information in databases so that it might be deployed ‘as needed’ in future. To anyone who is remotely sceptical about this process, it is clear that, beyond its official use—itself deeply authoritarian—the DNA database must have the role of further criminalising legitimate protest. Who would want to risk having their DNA kept for 6 or 12 years by joining a protest that is policed in the brutal way that the G20 protests were?

*    *    *

Whatever the database’s intended use, there are two inter-related ways in which both Humphrys and Chakrabarti fail to critically engage with Coaker’s problematic intervention. The first is that neither really questions Coaker’s (and of course, New Labour’s) tacit logic that it’s all down to the DNA. No one asks, for example, if it is really as simple as saying that by keeping everyone’s DNA, more crime will be solved. This is an incredibly important point, but which has so far remained uncontested. Its corollary is extraordinarily dangerous: if policing is no more than a matter of DNA-led intelligence, then we arrive at what EcoLogics has described as the Gattaca-ization of England, Wales and Northern Ireland (after the near future scenario conjured by the film Gattaca, which is worth watching).

The second point is that no one really questions (though Chakrabarti does momentarily flag it) Coaker’s assertion that the government has evidence that keeping innocent people’s DNA actually makes a real difference to conviction rates. What exactly is that evidence? And how has it been produced? This is, or must be, the next battleground for all those who wish to show up New Labour’s authoritarianism.

For more on this subject, see EcoLogics’ extended analysis of another BBC Today interview, conducted with Tony McNulty and Lord Justice Stephen Sedley in 2007.

By way of a postscript: how significant, and convenient that Jacqui Smith did not do this interview herself. EcoLogics can well imagine that as the consensus grows that New Labour has become authoritarian, Smith will leave it to other people to defend what must be a policy hatched at the very top of the New Labour party.

Update May 7, 2009, 12.20 BST

It looks like the battle over New Labour ‘evidence’ of the usefulness of the DNA database has already begun: Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, the scientist credited with the discoveries that led to the DNA database, is being quoted by the Guardian as saying the following:

Jeffreys dismissed a Home Office prediction that 4,500 fewer crimes will be detected if the proposals go ahead.

“There is an unspoken assumption in here that these thousands of crimes that will not be detected by not having the DNA will remain undetected and that simply isn’t the case. A significant number of these will be detectable through conventional police work, including the obtaining of fresh police DNA samples.”

He demanded that the government release further details of its concerns about poorer detection rates.

“We have been told some very cursory figures. One would like to know a great deal more. Are these serious crimes? Are they a relatively small number of individuals, for example serial burglars? We don’t have that information at all. And we need that information to be able to balance the improved ability to detect these crimes against the right to a private life.”

‘It was the events of September 11 that marked a turning point in history, where we confront the dangers of the future and assess the choices facing humankind.’
–Tony Blair, in a speech given to the New Labour Party conference, October 2001

‘So winning the battle against international terrorism is to win for the economy too.’
–Tony Blair, in a speech given to the Confederation of British Industry, November 2001

Note: this is the fifth in a series of posts:

New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (I): Introduction
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (II): The policing of ‘views’
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (III): RIPA 2000 and Blair’s Hobbesian Ideal
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (IV): Blunkett’s Law

Gustavo Leigh claimed personal responsibility for having ordered the air attacks on September 11.  General Leigh was reportedly the first man in the junta-to-be to sign up for the coup that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger hatched in Washington. Faced with an unexpectedly tenacious resistance from Allende and his supporters, Leigh commanded the Fuerza Aerea Chilena (FAC) to bombard Allende’s personal home, as well as the Palacio de la Moneda, Chile’s presidential palace and former mint.  Apparently, it took quite some time to muster and then fly FAC fighter-bombers to Santiago, so it was not until after midday that two British-made Hawker Hunters from the No. 7 squadron bombarded the presidential palace, Allende’s home, and government radio stations with their Hispano Sura R80 rockets.

To any Chilean not under the spell of a far right-wing ideology, the attack would have been the equivalent of hearing that the Air Chief Marshal of the RAF had ordered Typhoon F2’s to bomb 10 Downing Street, the BBC’s Bush House, and Tony Blair’s property on Connaught Square. Images of the Hawker Hunters diving at the Palacio de la Moneda went on to become the symbol of the new junta’s brutality—or if one was sufficiently to the right, the opening act of a new Chile.

In this, the penultimate post in the present series, EcoLogics makes the case that September 11, 1973—the ‘other 9/11’—is a better inaugural date for New Labour’s spiral of terror than is the 9/11 that Tony Blair described as a ‘turning point in history’. The idea is not to deny the historical significance of September 11, 2001—an event whose horrific death toll rightly provoked global outrage, and then also provided the Bush and Blair administrations with pretexts for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.  No, the point is to suggest that, given everything that we now know, the original ‘9/11’ was the more important date in so far as September 11, 1973 marked a foundational moment in the emergence of a fundamentalism that haunts us to this day: not Islamist fundamentalism, but the kind of economic fundamentalism that goes by the name of neoliberalism.

*   *   *

Earlier, it was noted that the Chilean coup was hatched by Richard Nixon’s republican government. This is no longer a matter of speculation, and can no longer be dismissed as myth-making by left-wing activists. Documents released by the U.S. government over the last decade have confirmed what the Chileans themselves always knew: that even if there was considerable unhappiness amongst right and centre-right groups with Allende’s policies (how could there not be?!), it took the bullying might of the U.S. government to institute a de facto economic blockade on Chile. It also took the C.I.A. to provide the logistics and the ideological shove necessary to get Chile’s famously professional army to take up arms against its own people. (If in doubt, have a look at the documents provided by the George Washington University’s National Security Archive).

A story that has been told less often is that many of the generals would have refused to join the coup had it not been for the fact that leading figures in Chile’s upper class persuaded them that a plan was at hand that would rescue the ravaged economy. Key members of the group in question came to be known as the Chicago Boys. This was a reference to the fact that they were disciples of two economists at the University of Chicago: Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger. The Wikipedia entry on the Chicago Boys provides the official account of how it is that a single foreign university, and indeed a single department within that university acquired so much influence in Chile, and eventually, in many other Latin American countries. What the entry does not explain is that the collaboration between Chile’s Catholic University and the economics department at U Chicago (which enabled the export of Friedman’s discourse) was part of a much broader ideological project—one which allowed powerful cultural institutions in the U.S. to become an integral aspect of the American ‘national security doctrine’ for Latin America. One such institution was the Rockefeller Foundation, which made multi-million dollar donations to the University of Chicago.  From this perspective, the collaboration between the Catholic University and the University of Chicago must be regarded as a form of ideological militancy, as opposed to a purely academic exchange about matters economical.

We will return to this point below. The plan that the Chicago Boys developed eventually came to be known as the ‘Miracle of Chile’, and became a template for similar developments in most other countries across the world. Under Pinochet and his Chicago Boy ministers, Chile abandoned the socialist model begun by Allende and introduced instead a string policies involving the deregulation of markets, the privatisation of state-owned companies, and the stabilisation of inflation via monetarist instruments. The second story that is not frequently told is that the Chilean Miracle was no more miraculous than New Labour’s more recent ‘miracle’; as noted by this blog in another post, leading economists such as Ricardo Ffrench-Davis have shown that, in fact, the policies eventually led to the collapse and nationalisation of leading Chilean banks by the early 1980s. One passage from Ffrench-Davis’ book almost reads like a description of what has happened this year to the U.S. and the U.K. economies:

‘The problems developing in the productive apparatus were closely linked to the functioning of the financial system and the indiscriminate trade opening. The model conceded a leading role to the financial reform. In fact, the financial system was transformed into the dominant decision-making center in the Chilean economy. In 1982, it became clear that indebtedness of firms and individuals was strangling economic activity and was growing rapidly owing to the prevailing high interest rates, while the revenue of enterprises was declining as a result of the domestic recession. The financial reform and the opening to capital flows constituted at first a determinant factor in the concentration of wealth and in crowing out of productive investment (Agosin 1998). Then, towards the end of the period, it revealed additional vulnerability that it had introduced into the national economy and the distortion of economic development created by the unbridled financierism to which it gave rise.’(1)

These issues did not stop Margaret Thatcher from seeking to emulate neoliberal policies in Britain. In 1980, she sent her trustworthy Cecil Parkinson, then Minister of Trade, to look at and learn from the ‘Chilean experience’. In an interview published in El Mercurio, the leading newspaper in Chile, Parkinson famously noted that the Chilean ‘economic experience’ was ‘very similar to what we are trying to develop now in Great Britain’. Asked about the differences between the two countries, he almost wistfully suggested that ‘Chile could impose a policy and a speed of application of that policy which just isn’t possible in this country’ (2).

*   *   *

The rest, as the saying goes, is history. Margaret Thatcher’s government went on to impose neoliberal ‘reform’ on the UK, and New Labour completed the process. The UK, like Chile in the 1980s, has now entered what many regard not as an economic recession, but an economic depression: the result here, as in Pinochet’s Chile, of the catastrophic blind spots of Friedman’s neoliberal discourse and ideology, and of the corruption that went, and still goes with it.

The question we must now answer is, how is this process tied to New Labour’s spiral of terror?

The first point that needs to be made is that Friedman’s shock therapy was never a purely economic therapy. Of course, no economic policy ever is: any form of economic policy-making is always social and political in so far as it entails a dynamic of prioritisation (some aspects of a market are valued over others), and in so far as it is always a social group, or a set of social groups’ economic priorities that end up being imposed on other groups. What is clear, however, is that Friedman’s recipe was particularly vitiated in that it was a product of a cold war ideology. In keeping with this ideology, it was first ‘applied’ in a country which was regarded as a test case in the U.S.’s  ‘total war’ against Marxism and socialism. Friedman’s neoliberal model was to be a prophylactic against the ‘contagion’ of Marxism, and of socialism more generally. The model was thus, from the start, at once an economic model, and a model with which to engage in ideological warfare of the kind that is now associated with Bush and Blair’s ‘war on terror’. (By way of an aside, let us not forget that even if in 1973 Blair was only just starting his undergraduate degree at Oxford [a degree in jurisprudence, for which he earned a second class mark], key members of the second Bush administration were junior members of the Nixon administration—and one of them was, of course, Dick Cheney.)

The second point is a somewhat more complex one in so far as it involves not a direct discursive challenge to one or another social order, but a kind of indirect consequence of Friedman’s discourse, and the broader neoliberal ideology. In the introduction of Friedman’s famous book, Capitalism and Freedom (a title that makes clear the political nature of his economic proposals), Friedman famously suggested that

‘…the scope of government must be limited. Its major function must be to protect our freedom both from the enemies outside our gates and from our fellow-citizens: to preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, to foster competitive markets.’

What is striking about this passage is the way in which it seemingly effortlessly establishes a link between neoliberalism and policing. Indeed, and as noted by this blog in earlier posts, interpreted in the way that they were by Thatcher, Reagan, Blair, and now Gordon Brown, these words help to explain not only the war-mongering character of the mentioned governments, but also, why these selfsame governments have fostered the kind of surveillance society we now have: if ‘our freedom’ must be protected from ‘enemies’ ‘outside’, it must also be protected from ‘our fellow citizens’.

A government that is conceived mainly as ‘fostering a competitive economy’—arguably, a codeword for the kind of intervention engaged by Peter Mandelson’s Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform—and of waging war against enemies ‘within’ and ‘without’, can only ever really end up being a government that is caught in the kind of spiral of terror described in these posts: beyond promoting certain groups’ access to economic wealth, the only social policy is one of policing. Policing in the literal sense of the word, but also, in the broader sense that is commonly described as New Labour’s ‘control freakery’, itself an expression of what EcoLogics has compared to the practices of Amazon.com in the post New Labour’s Amazonia.

Of course, the policing must be justified by repeated invocations of threats ‘outside’ and ‘within’ ‘our gates’. Linked as it is to New Labour’s Hobbesian instincts, and to the kind of actual or virtual corruption symbolised by David Blunkett’s work for Entrust, or Peter Mandelson’s favours to E.ON, this process must result in authoritarianism of the kind that has been promoted in the UK since Mrs Thatcher came to power 30 years ago, and which has worsened since Tony Blair was elected in 1997. Viewed from this perspective, the second 9/11 was not the beginning of the spiral of terror, but something like a perfect pretext for the process analysed in this series of posts.

In next week’s final post, some thoughts on what it would take to stop New Labour’s spiral of terror.

Notes

1) Ricardo Ffrench-Davis, Economic Reforms in Chile: From Dictatorship to Democracy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002, pp. 51-52.

2) Quoted in the Latin America Bureau’s (1983) Chile: the Pinochet Decade. London: LAB, p. 16.

‘I don’t think anyone can say that I have said one thing in public and done another in private.‘
–David Blunkett, speaking on the BBC 10 O’Clock News in December 2004
‘Entrust customers now use security to enable more than just protection. They work with Entrust to transform their security challenges into business opportunities‘
–Website of Entrust, the Texan digital ID security which Blunkett joined after leaving the government

Note: this is the fourth in a series of posts. The following is a list of the posts:

New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (I): Introduction
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (II): The policing of ‘views’
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (III): RIPA 2000 and Blair’s Hobbesian Ideal
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (IV): Blunkett’s Law
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (V): the other 9/11

Helena Kennedy once famously described David Blunkett as a ‘shameless authoritarian’. She suggested he took ‘lessons in jurisprudence from Robert Mugabe’(1), and today we have been reminded why many regard the man not so much as one of New Labour’s former stars, but rather, as its leading ex-asteroid.  Blunkett was the first Home Office secretary to push the idea of a digital ID card. And as noted in the previous post in this series, it was Blunkett that transformed RIPA 2000—New Labour’s snooper’s charter—into an act of legislation that might be used (and abused) by Britain’s town councils in order to spy on parents suspected of lying in school application forms. If, as Tony Blair claimed in 2004, New Labour asked the police what powers they wanted and gave them to them, it was almost certainly Blunkett that did both the asking and the giving.

Alas, now that New Labour’s financierism has almost bankrupted Britain, and that Blunkett’s former colleagues are scrambling to axe some of the more sybaritic trappings of their securi-state, Blunkett is himself scrambling to save his digital ID scheme. According to the BBC,

‘Asked whether ID cards could be dropped, Mr Blunkett told the BBC: “I think it is possible to mandate biometric passports. “Most people already have a passport but they might want something more convenient to carry around than the current passport and may be able to have it as a piece of plastic for an extra cost.” Using existing databases to hold the same information already gathered to issue passports could be a way of allaying fears over a new “database of information”, one of the key criticisms of the ID scheme. “People don’t worry about the Passport Agency but they do worry about some mythical identity database,” he said’(2).

The ‘mythical identity database’ is the one that Jacqui Smith decided to cancel this week (though she too, proposed a way of keeping the security services happy: the principle, if not the actual practice of the mother of all databases will be maintained via the private sector obligation to spy on us all). If, then, the database was mythical, it was mythical in the anthropological sense of myth, or perhaps in the sense of myth famously described by Roland Barthes in Myth Today. Jacqui Smith’s database, like Blunkett’s ID card, are the totems of New Labour’s securi-state. While it would seem that New Labour’s totem poles are being taken down in the wake of New Labour’s economic fiasco, the totemism that transforms digital surveillance systems into magical objects apparently remains very much alive in New Labour’s backrooms. Any suggestion that Blunkett’s idea somehow undermines the Brown government (as per some media accounts) is thereby foolish in the extreme.

*   *   *

In the third post in this series, EcoLogics noted that one motivation for New Labour’s spiral of terror can be found in the Hobbesian ideology espoused by Tony Blair. This account must be rendered more complex in two ways. First, the initial account is liable to be interpreted as a voluntaristic explanation of Tony Blair’s enthusiasm for authoritarian policing, i.e. it might be taken to mean that Blair is (or was) conscious of his own authoritarianism. While Blair’s capacity to lie with the conviction of an evangelist must never be underestimated, it would be a mistake to assume that he is fully cognizant of his own authoritarianism, let alone of its social consequences. Like every person on earth, Blair is, in this sense, at once his best and worst own judge. We must thus redefine ideology as meaning that serves to develop and sustain relations of domination. But if individuals make meaning, meaning also makes individuals (this a point made by EcoLogics in a post about neoliberalism, discourse and ideology).

Second, and echoing further the points made in that other post, even if we must allow for the possibility that politicians can deceive themselves even a they attempt to deceive others, we must also allow for the possibility that they may be the vehicles of powerful generic and specific institutions whose interests they articulate, however consciously or unselfconsciously, however simply or complexly. If Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are good examples of this process as it relates to financierism, David Blunkett is the best example of this process as it relates to the security industry.

An article published by The Observer on March 25, 2007, explains quite clearly how this is the case:

‘David Blunkett has taken a job advising a company interested in bidding to run Britain’s controversial identity cards programme, a policy he was the architect of and championed in government. The former Home Secretary took up the post for the Texas-based security firm Entrust, which specialises in securing digital information and combating identity theft, earlier this month. The firm already provides software for the Spanish national ID card system and has formally registered an interest in the British project. Blunkett is bound by a two-year ban on lobbying British ministers and officials from the date he resigned as Work and Pensions Secretary in November 2005. That does not expire until this November. His spokeswoman insisted yesterday that he would not be working in Britain for the company and would only advise on overseas work’ (3).

Entrust may be taken as a symbol of an industry that has arisen partly as a result of the neocon obsession with security. Entrust is to Blunkett and to British politics what Haliburton was to Cheney and to the invasion of Iraq. There are now hundreds, if not thousands of such firms busy lobbying governments across the world to spend billions on digital security systems. If the arms trade has always played a sinister role in the politics of countries around the world, the digital security business is now playing an even more nefarious role. To put the point more sharply, if companies such as Boeing and BAE have thrived on war, companies such as Entrust thrive on the kind of war that Blunkett waged on our civil liberties.

*   *   *

Blunket might prefer us to believe that his new-found role as a lobbyist for Entrust is a positive one: surely there is a goodness of fit between the big business of security, and Britain’s national security?

The first problem with any such argument is that, after some 12 years of massive investment in Britain’s security apparatus, we are no closer to achieving New Labour’s (or Entrust’s) ideal of a securi-state. Two events can be used to illustrate this point. On June 5, 2007, a burglar used what the BBC described as ‘his girlfriend’s Lithuanian ID card’ to enter offices behind 9 Downing Street. According to the BBC, ‘The 5 June break-in was described as an “astonishing” lapse of security “at the heart of government” as Marius [the burglar] walked unchallenged through a door marked “ministers” and, accompanied by his partner, entered the Cabinet Office’(4).

The second event was made public just yesterday (Monday, April 27, 2009). In an article titled ‘Gordon Brown steps in as agency fails to tackle organised crime gangs’, The Guardian suggested that ‘Downing Street is attempting to take control of the fight against organised crime amid growing concerns that thousands of major villains are not being brought to justice, the Guardian has learned. [… ] The prime minister’s strategy unit is investigating the failure by the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) – which was billed as Britain’s FBI – and the police to stop the rise of criminal gangs that run a multibillion-pound series of enterprises controlling the flow of drugs, human trafficking and illegal gun importation. The intervention is a measure of Gordon Brown’s concern and raises questions about the Home Office’s failure to get to grips with the problem at a time when agencies admit it has spread from the inner cities to the shires, eroding the fabric of almost all of Britain’s communities.’(5)

Both events show up the impossibility, to not say absurdity, of the securi-state ideal. Less than two years after 7/7, it was still possible to burgle—burgle!—the Cabinet Office. The idea of Gordon Brown taking on ‘thousands of major villains’ is itself absurd. Thousands of major villains? EcoLogics thought that Tony Blair had said in his July 2004 speech on law and order that in Britain we no longer have ‘wrong-headed villains’…. Semantics to one side, this blogger can almost imagine a Wild West scene, where Cowboy Brown walks down an alleyway, his twin Colt Single Action Army sixguns at the ready, hands held just above the cocked hammers… Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to conceive of Agent Brown waiting in a maroon sedan, with Agent Mandelson at the wheel. Brown and Mandelson are waiting with Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity (the FBI’s motto) for the villains to come out of… of…. Lloyds TSB or the Royal Bank of Scotland? Perhaps together they will stop ‘major villains’ like Fred the Shred from further eroding the fabled fabric of Britain’s shires…

EcoLogics jests, but actually, this is no laughing matter. Serious crime is, of course, serious. But even more serious is the manner in which New Labour continues to conflate social policy with policing. This is problematic enough in its own right, but when it is considered in the light of the manifest conflict of interest in Blunkett’s role as a lobbyist for Entrust, then the securi-state, like the financierist state, becomes a recipe for corruption. One line in the Entrust website pretty much says it all: ‘Entrust customers now use security to enable more than just protection. They work with Entrust to transform their security challenges into business opportunities’.

*  *  *

New Labour might well, indeed probably would suggest that the security breaches and threats constitute the best possible reason why even more draconian laws need to be passed, why a biometric ID card, disguised (or not) as a downsized passport is more necessary than ever. But this is to overlook yet another problem with New Labour’s ideal of a Securi-State—a problem that this blogger described as follows in a post published back in November 2007:

‘The more personal information you put about larger and larger numbers of people in one place—be it a portable hard drive, or a mainframe computer’s hard drive in some government department—the greater the potential for disaster (criminal or otherwise) when someone loses that information. In such a context, more information in one place is tantamount to less security, not more’(6).

As suggested in that post, we might well describe this paradox as Blunkett’s Law, in honour of Blunkett’s entrusting of the digital surveillance apparatus. If New Labour’s spiral of terror is a matter of ideology, it is also a matter of Blunkett’s Law. But this law can, in turn, only really be understood in the wake of the neoliberal deregulation that has led to New Labour’s economic disaster. This will be the subject of the penultimate post in this series.

Update Friday May 1, 2009:

1) How ironic that Blunkett is now trying to rebrand himself as a kind of moral compass for New Labour: “We have got to get back to old fashioned politics that is in touch with the people we represent, and avoid self- inflicted wounds.” Old fashioned politics? Is Blunkett referring to the scandals he was involved in a few years ago? Or perhaps he means the gravy train of Entrust or Blair’s J P Morgan? Or maybe it’s just good old Thatcherism?

2) Blunkett’s efforts to talk up a ‘cyber attack’ on the London Olympics are a textbook example of New Labour’s spiral of terror: such warnings can only serve to increase public anxiety, and of course, to drum up business for Entrust and other digital security businesses.

Notes

1) as quoted in Guardian, March 27, 2004, ‘A radical in the house’, http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1177977,00.html, accessed October 9, 2007.

2) Blunkett seeks ‘end to ID cards’, BBC Online, April 28, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8022791.stm, accessed April 28, 2009

3) ‘Blunkett is given a job at identity card firm’, Observer, March 25, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2007/mar/25/uk.idcards, accessed April 28, 2009.

4) Downing Street burglar walks free’, BBC Online, March 28, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7318719.stm, accessed April 28, 2009.

5) Guardian, April 27, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/27/serious-organised-crime-agency-brown-failure-gangs, accessed April 27, 2009

6) ‘Blunket’s Law’ and the Inland Revenue’s catastrophic loss of information’. http://ecologics.wordpress.com/2007/11/21/the-inland-revenues-catastrophic-loss-of-information-and-blunketts-law/