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.

‘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/

When the police interviewed me, I said that I saw no violence toward this individual, which I didn’t. And afterwards the police said it would take a very brave coroner to proclaim that the cause of death was because he was beaten up, or because of the protests that day. They said it would take a brave coroner to suggest the cause of death was because of any wrongdoing by the police. Initially I just kind of forgot about it. But it was later on in the day that I thought, why would someone say it would take a brave coroner? If the facts are there.

Daniel MacPhee, 24, social support worker, Kingston, quoted by the Guardian (1)

Let us be very clear: the old Latin saying ‘post hoc, ergo propter hoc’ (occurring after an event, therefore caused by the event) is as misleading as any real or alleged police attempt to cover up the events surrounding Ian Tomlinson’s death during the G20 protests in the City of London. We still do not know exactly what happened on the Royal Exchange Passage; but even if any investigation does eventually corroborate what seems increasingly clear—that Ian Tomlinson was assaulted by London’s riot police, that the attack was gratuitously violent, and that his subsequent death did occur moments after the attack—that does not necessarily mean that the police killed Ian Tomlinson.

*   *   *

Regrettably, these considerations are rather academic because, if past practice is anything to go by, it is highly unlikely that there will be a truly thorough, independent, and critical investigation of the events surrounding Ian Tomlinson’s death. It speaks volumes, in this sense, that the authority charged with investigating possible police crimes—the IPCC—can only use interviews produced by the police themselves. If the quote that serves as an epigraph for this post is true, it also speaks volumes that the police appear to have been so cockily sure that a coroner was unlikely to dare to associate the police with the death.

But perhaps the most worrisome aspect is the one mentioned by the Guardian’s Duncan Campbell, who noted that

‘Although the Guardian reported the death [of Ian Tomlinson] on its front page, almost all the coverage elsewhere ignored it completely or concentrated on a version of events that suggested that the police’s only connection with Tomlinson had been to try to rescue him from a baying mob of anarchists. The police were “pelted with bottles by a screaming mob” (the Mirror) or “pelted with bottles as a medical team tried to revive a demonstrator” (Mail). Tomlinson had died “after being ‘caught among the mob’” (Telegraph). The BBC TV night-time news the following day made no mention of the death in its main bulletin.(2)

*   *   *

If this kind of impunity—legal, and ‘media’ impunity—were a rare or isolated event, it would be serious enough. But coming as it does so soon after what many regard as the Metropolitan Police’s efforts to cover-up the chaotic circumstances surrounding Jean-Charles de Menezes’ death(3), it once again raises questions as to the systems by means of which we hold the police accountable for any abuse of their powers.

EcoLogics recently published a critique about the police’s claims that we face a ‘summer of rage’ in the UK, and this critique may shed some light on the policing of the G20 protests. According to the Times,

‘Large numbers of police forces are planning to cut thousands of officers despite the threat of a recession-driven surge in crime and disorder. Representatives from dozens of police forces contacted by The Times last night gave a grim picture of falling numbers and “significant and painful” cuts. One of Britain’s most experienced chief constables said that forces were being dangerously weakened at a time when a strong police force could be essential to “hold the line”. Timothy Brain, Chief Constable of Gloucestershire since 2001, said: “There is a risk of increased crime and disorder as a result of the effect of recession and many police forces will be made weaker as a result of the latest grant and council tax settlements‘(4).

In the light of the police’s worries about their own job losses, a critical observer has to wonder whether the kind of policing that was put in practice in the City of London was not actually designed to produce rage, and violent reactions on the part of protesters. Last week, one after another person who engaged in protest (or was simply trapped in the area) noted how the so-called ‘kettling’ of people—effectively arresting large numbers of people without due process, and without access to food, drink or toilets for hours and hours on end—generated much anger in what was otherwise a mostly peaceful protest. One after another media account documented how people—again, some of them inadvertently caught up in the fray—asked to leave, and were prevented from doing so by officers who gave no valid justification for the de facto arrests. Kettling—a euphemistic name if ever there was one for wrongful imprisonment—was once used only to ‘corral’ protesters who were deemed to be engaging in criminal actions. As of the G20 protests, it would appear that the police plan to use it as the single method of policing all protests, no matter how peaceful.

While the use of kettling is relatively new, the conflict of interests mentioned earlier is not. As noted recently by George Monbiot,

‘there has always been a conflict of interest inherent in policing. The police are supposed to prevent crime and keep the streets safe. But if they are too successful, they do themselves out of a job. They have a powerful interest in exaggerating threats and, perhaps, an interest in ensuring that sometimes these threats materialise. This could explain what I’ve seen at one protest after another, where peaceful demonstrations turn into ugly rucks only when the police attack. The wildly disproportionate and unnecessary violence I’ve sometimes seen the police deploy could scarcely be better designed to provoke a reaction’ (5).

This is, of course, an argument that is not only impossible to prove, but which can be plausibly denied: how absurd to argue that any police officer would want to face increasingly angry protesters. But of course, such an argument conflates the experiences of officers on the ’shop floor’ of public protest, and that of their strategists and commanders in the highest police headquarters across the land. It also overlooks the relative impunity with which some of the officers who do have to face protesters appear to be able to engage in brutal retribution if and when individual protesters, or indeed groups of protesters, ‘cross the line’. Although Ian Tomlinson does not appear to have been engaging in any kind of protest, it seems he was the victim of precisely this kind of retribution: an angry officer appears to have ‘flown off the handle’, and the event—just one, by all accounts, of many others like it—would have remained carefully unnoticed by most of the media had it not been for the Guardian, and for the video of an American fund manager.

Returning to the apparent interest in talking up the notion of a ’summer of rage’, are we really expected to believe that the police don’t know full well what the effects of ‘kettling’ are on the psychology of people who protest? And are we really expected to accept that kettling is, hands down, the best, the ‘one and only’, indeed the way of policing protests—even manifestly peaceful protests? Ecologics is mindful of the words of John O’Connor, a former Met officer who has recently criticised the tactic: ‘”They are using this more and more,” he said. “Instead of sending snatch squads in to remove those in the crowd who are committing criminal offences, they contain everyone for hours. It is a retrograde step … it is an infringement of civil liberties”‘(6)

*   *   *

There is another dimension of the policing of the G20 protests which has thus far escaped the attention of most journalists, but which is equally, if not more serious. The dimension involves the rise of a surveillance society in the UK. As one article in the Guardian noted last week, when people were ‘finally allowed to go on Wednesday night, they were ordered to provide names and addresses and have their pictures taken. If they refused, they were sent back behind the cordon’(7). In other words, people were given a choice of remaining under de facto and illegal arrest, or giving up personal details.

The emergence of a surveillance society is arguably the beginning of a police state ‘by other means’, a Gattaca-like social space where digital technologies may be employed in an effort to suppress protest before it even takes place. To take names, addresses and photographs from people who have been engaged in peaceful protest (or are simply caught by the police ‘kettle’) is, in some respects, little different from taking a buccal swab from someone who is a witness to a crime, or an alleged crime. It begins to criminalise anyone and everyone who comes into contact, however tangentially, with the police. In so doing, it tacitly inverts the age-old principle of common law, that people should be regarded as being innocent until proven guilty. In New Labour’s brave new world, the cost of total security—in fact, a security as leaky as the many databases that have been either lost or stolen from the government—is the erosion of the principles of the habeas corpus.

A detailed, historical study of how this dynamic has emerged has yet to be written, but anyone who investigates carefully enough will soon find that an economic motivation is at least partly to blame.  The motivation lies in the veritable industry that is emerging and promoting computer-based products ostensibly designed to provide total state, corporate, or private security. If the arms industry has played a nefarious role in the UK’s politics—to name but one example,  witness the High Court ruling, almost exactly a year ago, that the SFO acted unlawfully by dropping its investigation into BAE Systems—the everyday security industry is bound to generate its own actual or virtual corruption. In the UK,  perhaps the best example of the potential for a conflict of interest, if not for actual corruption involves David Blunkett, the former Home Office secretary. Blunkett enthusiastically championed a digital ID security system. He then took up a post as an adviser to Entrust, the Texan digital security company whose business is to set up precisely the kind of digital ID card that Blunkett and now Jacqui Smith have been so keen to institute[8]. One sentence in Entrust’s 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‘(9).

If EcoLogics flags up this issue, it is to warn that a combination of weak policing of the police (yes, the police must themselves be policed); what some have described as ‘crony capitalism’ or corporate clientelism, or at least, a ‘jobs for the boys’ mentality; and a ‘total’ surveillance culture pushed by companies like Entrust is likely to constitute an exceptionally toxic cocktail: a cocktail that is sooner or later bound to generate the kind of repressive corruption—or corrupt repression—normally associated with conventional ‘police states’. Leading politicians and corporate heads in the UK need to be aware of the poison that they are sipping when they agree to aid and abet this dynamic.

Of course, we are far from a conventional police state in the UK. But are we as far as we would like to think that we are? Ian Tomlinson’s death may, and should be taken as a litmus test: anything short of a thorough, very transparent, and above all critical investigation may well end up confirming the growing belief that, when it comes to the democratic right to protest, the police, with the active connivance of the New Labour government, are a law onto themselves and exist to protect the interests of an increasingly corrupt elite—the kind of people symbolised not only by the former leaders of the country’s leading financial institutions, but now, by the politicians who believe it is perfectly legitimate to have the state pay for their own personal luxuries.

References

1) http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/08/g20-ian-tomlinson-death-witnesses, accessed April 8, 2009

2) http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/apr/07/civil-liberties-g20-police-assault-ian-tomlinson, accessed April 8, 2009

3) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7764882.stm, accessed April 8, 2009.

4) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article5793087.ece, accessed April 8, 2009.

5) http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/apr/01/g20-policing-climate-protest-riot, accessed April 8, 2009.

6) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/03/g20-protests-police-tactics, accessed April 8, 2009.

7) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/03/g20-protests-police-tactics, accessed April 8, 2009.

8] http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2007/mar/25/uk.idcards, accessed April 8, 2009.

9) http://www.entrust.com/corporate/history.htm, accessed April 8, 2009.

Note: this post consolidates three posts written on the subject on November 21st

From yesterday’s Guardian online:

‘The chancellor, Alistair Darling, today admitted the personal details of 25 million individuals had been lost by HM Revenue and Customs. The information includes the names, dates-of-birth, national insurance numbers and in some cases the bank details of those claiming child benefits. Paul Gray, the chairman of HM Revenue and Customs, today resigned over the “extremely serious failure” of security. [...] In a Commons statement greeted by gasps of astonishment from MPs, Darling told the Commons that two discs containing details of the 7.25 million families claiming child benefit, sent to the National Audit Office, failed to reach the addressee.’ (1)

* * *

Here are three simple questions for Gordon Brown, and the rest of the members of the New Labour party:

1) If the Inland Revenue can lose this data, who is to say that a similar disaster could not occur with the data for the proposed digital ID cards?

2) If the Inland Revenue can lose this data, who is to say that a similar disaster could not occur with the data for the proposed national medical database?

3) If the Inland Revenue can lose this data, who is to say that a similar disaster could not occur with the data for the proposed universal DNA database?

* * *

Let us be very clear. 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.

We might describe this paradox, if it is a paradox at all, as ‘Blunkett’s Law’ in honour of the (former) New Labour minister who was the most ardent advocate of gathering and storing personal information about UK citizens, and who was given a job advising Entrust, an American company that specialises in producing digital ID cards, almost as soon as he left government.

In November 2004, the Home Office put out a press release that included the following quote by David Blunkett, then the Home Office Secretary:

‘The ability to prove one’s identity reliably is an ever-more important aspect of modern life. A national ID cards scheme will provide a ‘gold standard’ for doing that, protecting individuals from the modern-day crime of identity theft, protecting public services for use by those who are properly entitled to them, and helping us tackle crime, terrorism, and illegal immigration and working.

‘They will also give people a simple and secure means of verifying their identity to help them travel freely and complete everyday transactions securely, simply and with confidence.‘ (2)

How hollow these words now seem. They could almost have been written by the PR people in Entrust.

* * *

The government would like us to think that this was a ‘one off’, a minor procedural error with what might, ‘admittedly’, be catastrophic consequences. But two sets of events contradict this convenient version. First, amongst other incidents, HM Revenue and Customs had 41 laptops stolen over the last year, including 16 that were stolen directly from an HMRC office (3). And second, it has emerged that the loss of the data of/on 25 million people was arguably a disaster waiting to happen. The BBC’s Today programme reports today (November 21, 2007) that several employees and former employees have suggested that the merger of the Inland Revenue and Revenue and Customs in 2005 created the conditions for this ‘error’ by slashing approximately 25% of the workforce and by introducing managerial systems that led to low staff morale.

Alistair Darling’s characteristic response: deny any systemic problem, but bring in a private corporation (PricewaterhouseCoopers) to reveal any such problems.

* * *

So the New Labour logic continues unabated: use ’slash and burn’ techniques to erode the public services in the name of ‘rationalisation’ and ‘efficiency savings’, and when this produces catastrophic failure, call in the private sector to tell us what went wrong. Brilliant! If privatisation generates profits for the private sector, then the failure of the already semi-privatised institutions can generate even more profit for the private sector!

It’s a win-win situation for ‘everyone’ except, of course, the 25 million victims of data ‘loss’, let alone all those who might one day be the victims of any further ‘errors’ once additional national databases are in place: not least, the DNA database, and the NHS national health database.

UPDATE: THE PLOT THICKENS

Some breaking news:

Thus far, New Labour has suggested that the data loss was a result of an ‘error’ by a junior civil servant. We were given to understand that none of this should ever have happened, that it was all down to some sloppy employee who did not follow the rules. The BBC’s Radio 4 7pm news bulletin has just suggested otherwise: the bulletin reports that the Tories are claiming that a senior business manager was involved in the decision to send on the two discs with all the data that the National Audit Office (NAO) didn’t want, e.g. the bank details of the benefit claimants. Rather more interestingly, the BBC is also reporting that the business manager in question wrote an email to the NAO saying that ‘those details [the ones the NAO didn't want] would not be taken off because doing so would require an extra payment to their [the Inland Revenue's] IT contractor’.

* * *

This would confirm what many of us suspected: that the data loss is part of a pattern that is consistent with New Labour’s political and social modus operandi, which I described above as a kind of welfare ’slash and burn’ approach—one that weakens state institutions to the point that it seems, all too often, that they must be privatized.

Whether this is a fair assessment or not—whether the Tory version of events proves to be accurate or not—I was stunned to read what the BBC’s Nick Robinson said in his blog today:

‘Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding something – I’m sure you’ll respond if I am – but I fail to see the relevance of job cuts or unopened post or low morale at HMRC to this. Employees should know that data protection is sacred and if they don’t there should be systems in place that ensure they alone cannot make serious errors.’(4)

Eh? Did I read this correctly? Is (was) Robinson really arguing that job cuts or low morale wouldn’t have an effect on the way in which staff manage their daily tasks!?

Perhaps Robinson is so highly paid that he’s forgotten what it is like to have an over–demanding, and relatively poorly paid job that can be lost whenever it suits a minister to demand ‘efficiency savings’? In such a context, how dare he—we— expect that staff working under conditions of duress should treat data protection—or any other task— as something ’sacred’? The combination of naiveté and arrogance is simply breathtaking.

References

1) ‘Revenue and Customs loses details of 25m people’, in Guardian Online, November 20, 2007. http://politics.guardian.co.uk/economics/story/0,,2214109,00.html. Accessed November 20, 2007.
2) emphasis added by EcoLogics. Quote published by Home Office press release on 17 November 2007, ‘Blunkett: ID Cards Will Protect Civil Liberties’, at http://press.homeoffice.gov.uk/press-releases/Blunkett__Id_Cards_Will_Protect_?version=1, accessed November 21, 2007.
3) see http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm071025/text/71025w0031.htm, accessed November 21, 2007.
4) http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/nickrobinson/2007/11/a_yawning_gap.html, accessed 21 November 2007.

It looks like the BBC has done it again: it has broadcast another programme that contributes to what I have described in other posts as the Gattacaization of the UK. This time the ‘culprit’ is You and Yours, a programme that the BBC’s Radio 4 broadcasts from Monday to Friday between 12 and 1pm. The BBC describes You and Yours as a ‘consumer affairs programme’, and indeed many of the You and Yours programmes provide a forum for listener phone-ins about controversial subjects and the peccadilloes committed by public and private corporations in the UK. A favourite You and Yours format begins with an introduction to a subject, and then invites listeners to call in with their views. So it was on September 25, 2007(1), when the subject of debate was New Labour’s ‘universal’ DNA database.

When I started to listen to the programme I began to hope that it would offer a critical perspective on the database. In marked contrast to the Today programme interview (the subject of some of my previous analyses), You and Yours began by explaining that ‘Maintaining and developing the database is one of the government’s top priorities, over 300 million pounds has been invested in the last five years.’ The programme also explained that ‘Last Autumn Tony Blair called for the DNA database to be expanded to include every UK citizen.’ It even spelled out the fact that the database was growing by 30,000 samples a month taken from suspects or recovered from crime scenes—an aspect that has received little attention thus far and which presumably means that if you happen to drop a hair or shed some skin anywhere near what subsequently becomes a crime scene, your DNA too, might well become a part of the UK’s growing DNA database. Small wonder then that, as the programme noted, DNA samples have doubled to four million in the last five years.

So the programme got off to what sounded like a good start. But things began to go downhill when the ‘experts’ for and against the database were brought in. Actually, they weren’t quite ‘brought in’, if by this one means that they were brought physically to the You and Yours studio. Perhaps for budgetary reasons, the editors of You and Yours simply used the same Today programme interview given by Lord Justice Stephen Sedley some weeks ago, but broke it up into a series of fragments that were then juxtaposed with similarly fragmentary bits of an interview given by the Baroness Helena Kennedy QC to a third programme, the BBC’s Law in Action. Lord Justice Sedley was presented as the expert in favour of the DNA database, and was described not just as ‘the senior appeals court judge’, but as the ‘president of the Commission of Human Rights’. For her part, Helena Kennedy was treated as the expert ‘against’ the database, and was introduced as ‘Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, the outgoing chair of the Human Genetics Commission’, who ‘isn’t keen on the idea’. In fact, and as my transcript below shows, at least the bits of the Kennedy interview that were recycled by You and Yours suggest that Kennedy is quite keen on the DNA database, if not on the universal DNA database (2).

Here is the transcript of what she said (I have already transcribed the Sedley interview in another post, so will not do so below again; you may wish to see a transcript of that interview first by visiting my earlier posts).

Sedley [Where we are at the moment is indefensible…]

Kennedy: The public are very supportive of the police having access to the DNA and creating a… a database. What I think the public weren’t as conscious of was the possibility that um in fact it would grow and that um many of our children might end up being on it, or that disproportionately black people are on it at a level that is not reflective of their place in society[sic]. So I mean there are anxieties I think in that if you unpick this that there exist amongst the public.

Sedley: [Explains that to eliminate the database would be to go backwards, and explains that DNA samples kept for acquitted people have later allowed police to catch and convict serial rapists.]

Kennedy: ‘I think the Scots have actually er got a good way of dealing with it, which is to say we keep the DNA even of those who are acquitted but for a limited amount of time, and ah, I think in Scotland it’s something like 6 years. I would be inclined to believe that you should be able to keep it for sexual offences simply because we know more about sexual offences and we know that it’s quite difficult to get convictions in sexual offences often because it’s one person’s word against another. But people who commit sexual offences often repeat, err you know there’s very rarely a one off, they often repeat it and therefore I think it would be worth arguing that ah people who are investigated, and possibly even put on trial for a… sexual offence or acquitted should remain on the database for err six or ten years.’

Sedley [Explains that all visitors to the UK should also have their DNA taken too.]

Kennedy: ‘I think that it’s hard to imagine how you would do it, I mean, other than to say that this is a long term project and every baby that is born would now have its DNA taken at birth and kept, and everybody coming to visit Britain or to stay then is put onto the database but otherwise how would you do it, do we all queue up at police stations and how do you, how do you create a system to do this, you know, and ah it’s not terribly practical…’

* * *

Helena Kennedy has built up quite a reputation as something of a civil libertarian, if not a New Labour dragon slayer—that is to say, a slayer of New Labour dragons. She once described David Blunkett, the former Home Office secretary as ‘“a shameless authoritarian”’, and indeed as one who took ‘”lessons in jurisprudence from Robert Mugabe”’(3). (Blunkett was a champion of the digital ID card, and after a series of scandals forced him to resign not once but twice from government, he became an adviser to Entrust, a US corporation that is reportedly interested in supplying the UK with the technology required for the new digital ID cards[4].)

I would have thought that most UK citizens are in no position, if only for what might be described as ‘national-historical’ reasons, to use Robert Mugabe as a kind of civil liberties bogey. Be that as it may, it does appear that Kennedy has earned a reputation for being, as the title of a Guardian piece suggested in 2004, ‘a radical in the house [of Lords]’. Indeed the same article quotes her as saying that “… you have to look at yourself in the mirror every morning. Someone said to me that you have to swallow stones in government. Well, I do understand that there has to be a degree of compromise in government, but there are some stones that I just won’t swallow.”’(5)

It was thus doubly disappointing to hear that Helena Kennedy has apparently swallowed a very big stone—some might call it a civil liberties boulder—in order to offer what can only be described as a qualified defence of the DNA database. This might seem paradoxical because she was chosen by You and Yours ostensibly to present the views against the universal DNA database. There is, however, no real paradox involved; as I noted in another post, we are living in times of political ‘quasi-ecumenism’, and this means that the mass media regularly stage ‘debates’ between people who might seem to oppose each others’ views, but whose views are framed in such a manner as to directly or indirectly make them seem to support whatever government policy is being debated. While You and Yours may have allowed some listeners with truly critical views to phone in, its introduction, which will have set the scene in more ways than one for the phone-ins that followed, was a textbook example of pseudo-debate.

Why has Helena Kennedy agreed, if indeed she has agreed, to contribute to this dynamic? Presumably Kennedy has thought long and hard about what it means, in constitutional terms, to accept the imposition of a surveillance system that assumes that someone is, or might be guilty ten years after being acquitted by the courts (she proposes that the scheme might be left in place for six or ten years after someone has been acquitted). Presumably she has also thought long and hard about the medium– to long–term implications of the imposition of such a scheme in a society where it is not unknown for the very politicians who promote surveillance systems to then become advisers for the corporations that are keen to make money from the selfsame technologies. In her relatively new-found role as a politician, Kennedy has, finally, presumably also thought long and hard about how far one should go in the direction of what Max Weber once described as an ethics of power or ‘responsibility’—i.e. under what circumstances should one accept the anointments of power, and what are the costs of such anointments from the point of view of combating the creeping Gattacaization of the UK.

* * *

In today’s other post, I refer to what I describe as the ideological dynamic of ‘entre-nous’. You and Yours is a good example of this dynamic, and indeed the intervention in the programme by Tony Lake is a case in point. Lake is the Chair of the National DNA Database, Chief Constable of Lincolnshire Police, and the representative on forensic subjects for the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Lake and the ACPO have worked hard to maintain an image of impartiality vis-à-vis the DNA database; however, given the quietly exponential growth of the database, we have to assume that the members of ACPO are either keen on the project, or keen to please their current political masters. Whatever the case, at one point in the interview one of the presenters in You and Yours asks Lake if he himself as given up his DNA. This question will almost certainly have been agreed in advance, and Lake does not disappoint: Lake has indeed given up his DNA, so that it ‘should’ be ‘there’ [presumably he refers to the database, but this is by no means clear, and it would be interesting to see this point followed up by the BBC]).

Now if ‘Tony’, who sounds like a very nice man, has given up his DNA, then it must be alright mustn’t it? And if this is so, why shouldn’t you give up you and yours?

References

1) Unfortunately, there is no You and Yours ‘listen again’ archive (beyond a week), so I cannot direct readers back to the programme itself.
2) Note: I could not access the Law in Action programme because it has no ‘listen again’ archive. So there is a very real possibility that Helena Kennedy was rather more critical there than she appeared to be in You and Yours. I certainly know from my own experience that one has little or no control over what happens to a radio interview or to a TV interview, especially when an interview is not broadcast live, and when it is taken apart and recontextualized a posteriori by editors during postproduction.
3) as quoted in GuardianUnlimited, March 27, 2004, ‘A radical in the house’, http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1177977,00.html, accessed October 9, 2007.
4) See Observer, March 25, 2007, ‘Blunkett is given job at identity card firm’, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,,2042271,00.html#article_continue, accessed October 9, 2007.
5) GuardianUnlimited, March 27, 2004, ‘A radical in the house’, http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1177977,00.html, accessed October 9, 2007.

(Note: The following post is the last in a series about an interview given by Lord Justice Sedley to the BBC’s Today programme on September 5, 2007. The post is unlikely to make much sense unless you listen first to that interview. Alternatively, you may wish to read my transcription of the interview. You may also wish to look at the rest of the posts in the series:

1 Introductory Comments
2 The Confusion of Powers
3 Lord Justice Sedley’s (and John Humphrys’) ‘Common Sense’

Central to the fate of the universal DNA database is a political modus operandi which I’ve not yet really explained, but which requires elucidation if one is to acquire a better understanding of Lord Justice Sedley’s, and especially of Tony McNulty’s role in the BBC Today interview of September 5, 2007. This modus operandi might be described as an ‘ecumenical’ mode of policymaking, or rather, as a ‘quasi-ecumenical’ mode: I borrow the term that, in the context of Christian religion, refers to the inclusion of different (Christian) groups under one roof. New Labour works very hard to seem to be inclusive of different people’s views. But I want to argue that, more often than not, New Labour’s apparent ecumenism actually works to suppress truly heterodox perspectives by generating relatively controlled simulacra of debate in the media, and/or in policy reviews and other apparently consultative exercises.

* * *

Broadly speaking, it can be suggested that a political party that wants to introduce an unpopular policy—or a policy that contradicts some of the most fundamental values of a country’s democracy—has four options.

The first option is to promote a national debate that is won (or lost) by way of the force of real argument. This is almost never the New Labour way of doing things when it comes to politically sensitive issues. To be sure, sociologists would rightly argue that in mass cultures, a ‘national debate’ is not actually feasible, if by this one means a debate that engages with all the different perspectives, or a debate that can arrive by way of ‘honest argument’ at any simple or unambiguous ‘national truth’. There are so many people, and there are such vast social distances, that any debate will necessarily under- or misrepresent at least some perspectives. In any case, any ‘debate’ will have to occur by proxy, i.e. by way of representatives that speak for others. This is one of the reasons why the media of mass communication play such a useful, but also such a potentially nefarious role in modern cultures: some political correspondents routinely assign themselves the role of being the (unelected) representatives of ‘the public’, or of ‘what the public wants’; unfortunately, this subtle displacement is seldom understood to be just that (a displacement, or indeed, a replacement of the own voice) by some audiences

The second option is simply to introduce the policy (or take the political action), and batten down the hatches: deny any controversy or wrongdoing, impose the unpopular policy even as you deny it, and send in the police to repress dissent if and when it happens. That is what happened with Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax, and what has happened with George W’s and Tony Blair’s Iraqi adventure. The political costs—not to speak of the humanitarian costs for Iraq—have been clear for all to see: despite having no real opposition, New Labour might well have lost the 2005 election if Tony Blair hadn’t promised to step down as prime minister.

The third option is more astute, and involves a variety of what can be described mock exercises in public consultation. Faced with the vast, complex, and potentially contradictory nature of the society, politicians may, indeed must resort to a variety of methods of obtaining ‘feedback’ from their constituents. One way of doing so is to canvas people by door-stepping or a variety of similarly informal means such as chats with friends, fellow politicians, or people who attend official meetings/gatherings. Another is to take note of the views of real or self-proclaimed ‘opinion makers’, or indeed to generate and/or participate in debates such as the one on the Today programme. Yet another is to use quasi-academic methods: polls, focus groups, and now the so-called ‘citizen’s juries’.

It may seem—and indeed New Labour would like us to believe—that especially the latter means of consultation are truly ecumenical, democratic, and indeed ‘scientific’ in the sense of being disinterested and objective accounts of what ‘the public really wants’. In fact, the mentioned methods are always shaped subtly and not-so-subtly by the interests of whomever asks the questions or otherwise guides the consultation process. So it is with New Labour, whose politicians have almost routinely used these and other methods to shamelessly legitimate their own interests in one policy ‘review’ after another. Three recent examples are New Labour’s consultation over the future of nuclear power; its consultation over the future of genetically modified (GM) crops; and its review of ‘skills’ in the UK’s various levels of education (1). I suggest that the current review of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which McNulty refers to repeatedly in the interview, is yet another example.

If and when such consultations do show a real diversity or difference in views—and this most certainly can happen—then politicians like McNulty can always either ignore the outcome of a particular consultation exercise, or ‘reinterpret’ their results so as to suit the own ends. As long as key members of the political establishment and crucially, key journalists either accept such machinations or fail to speak up against them, then the political party’s version of the outcome of consultation can be represented as being as good as the allegedly ecumenical ‘way forward’.

There is, however, a fourth option, and this is arguably the one that New Labour usually prefers. This option is, from the political party’s perspective, the safest one in that it guarantees, or appears to guarantee, a desired outcome. It involves the combination of elements of the second and third options: a de facto practice is quietly introduced that makes a certain policy seem inevitable by the time that debate is allowed, organised by, or indeed forced upon the government. It is this that I refer to as the ‘quasi-ecumenical’ mode of governance.

* * *

My account of this mode may sound overly cynical, or even conspiratorial. But I would argue that it has become New Labour’s everyday way of doing politics in the UK.

The introduction of a universal DNA database is a case in point. The police have been quietly building up the world’s largest database of DNA samples, taking and keeping samples from anyone they could. By the time a debate began to take place, so many samples had been collected that, as might be expected from a statistical point of view, the police had used the samples to catch some criminals who might otherwise have escaped conviction. The scene was thus set for someone to come along, and say ‘hey, this is actually too good a system to give up’, or ‘we can’t possibly go back on this now’ or better yet, ‘the genie is out of the bottle’. This is arguably the role played by, or given to, Lord Justice Sedley. And it is Tony McNulty’s words that I quote when I use the metaphor of the genie: after denying, rather obliquely, that the current status quo is ‘indefensible’ (Sedley’s term), he goes on to say that ‘I think Sir Stephen and Richard are right in saying you can’t go back this genie is out of the bottle…‘ This tactic (option two, above) is seconded by another (option three) which involves the ruse of debate, and consultation. As McNulty puts it, ‘… it [a universal DNA sample] is a very, very powerful tool, and there’s a huge debate needed about where we go from where we are now, will the up to universality [unclear], and again, like Richard, I welcome the debate it is much needed.’

Note that, contrary to what McNulty says in the quote above, Richard Thomas has not said that you ‘can’t go back’, and indeed that neither he nor Sedley have used the metaphor of the ‘genie in the bottle’. But no matter; the trick is to introduce the controversial practice by the back door; deny (obliquely) any criticism if and when found out; announce a review which seems to be ‘ecumenical’ but actually helps to introduce your policy; and as you do so, pick up any positive comments made by critics and twist them a little bit to make the critics seem to support your own views.

As McNulty says to Humphrys, ‘I think your your your point all be it about universality but about the stigma is important, this is not about a DNA database of everyone who’s ever committed a crime and been guilty, it’s a DNA database of anyone who’s… encountered the criminal justice system, and other samples that are lifted from crime scenes, so there’s about four million individuals and it is a hugely powerful tool, ah and and and Sir Stephen almost made the point himself, there are those who, because of that interaction with the system are on, are on the database for something fairly innocuous, who those very individuals have been on a cold case analysis basis been convicted of very serious crimes going way back because of the DNA samples from them’.

And again: ‘The point that we’re looking at in the Review of the legislation, PACE [unclear] and the sort of overarching legislation for these matters is looking at that and all other points about biometrics in general but specifically DNA. So the points about retention, who should be on and who should be off, when you encounter the criminal justice system should you go straight on all those points will be part of that review, and I think it is a very welcome and serious debate.’

When John Humphrys presses him on the current status quo, there is more of the same:

John Humphrys: So you accept that there are huge civil liberties…

Tony McNulty: Oh I do absolutely, absolutely, I…

John Humphrys (interrupting): in that case you must be outraged that there are people on that database who should not be on it today, why are they still there?

Tony McNulty: Well it depends that’s exactly why we’re looking at it through the PACE review now, are there those on it who shouldn’t be on it, are those who do encounter the criminal justice system but are subsequently not found guilty of any ah crime, is there still some value for the wider public of them being on for a very limited period, I do take Richard’s point too about those involved in very serious crime can and should be on there uh indefinitely, I think people accept that.

* * *

It might be argued that I have not really proven that McNulty/New Labour are in favour of the database, or that the review is a sham from the point of view of its ecumenism. But consider the following questions: if New Labour doesn’t agree with—indeed, is not behind—the proposal for a universal DNA database, then why has it allowed the police to take and keep the DNA samples of anyone whom, in McNulty’s delicate expression, ‘encounters’ the criminal justice system (witnesses, people proven innocent by courts, children younger than 10, and so forth)?

Second, if the review is really a consultative exercise, why would McNulty be proposing, as his review of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act does, to extend the DNA sampling to minor offences, and to even set up so-called ‘STHF’s’ (‘Short Term Holding Facilities’) for this purpose in shopping malls and other city centre locations?

If this is still not regarded as sufficient evidence, then perhaps one might wish to ask a third, and rather more contextual question: would a government that wants to introduce a national ID card really balk at the introduction of a universal DNA database?

In case the reader is not familiar with the national identity card proposal, New Labour’s proposed ID card will not be the kind of ID card that many if not most countries around the world require as a matter of course. No, New Labour is proposing to introduce the father of all ID cards which will include all the items listed here. I will analyse this list in another post; here it suffices to explain that the list includes not just biometric information, but the information contained in any document that the government of the day might wish to attach to the ID by digital means. In short, if anything has been written or otherwise registered about a person in any context, and the government decides that it should be included in her/his ID card, then that card will record it and will make it instantly available to anyone who has access to the card’s information—the list could include all manner of commercial transactions, medical records (which are themselves about to become part of a national database), and of course, the use of data systems of any and all manner of political and cultural institutions. It is worrisome enough to consider what might happen to this information if and when a government—New Labour or otherwise—wishes to suppress any political group’s dissent to its policies. But in a context where both the current and the previous governments have shown again and again that they will give way to the demands of the US and of large private corporations (the scandal over the bribery and corruption charges against BAE is only the latest example), one has to assume that this information might be used and abused not just by the police, but by private corporations and foreign governments. Consider for example, that the EU is currently handing over a lot of sensitive information to the US when any European resident travels to the US. And of course, that is not even to begin to consider what might happen to the information if it reaches fraudsters: one does not have to be a security expert to know that the best way to ensure that there can be a total ‘identity theft’ is to put all the relevant information in one place.

* * *

The following were some of the words pronounced by Tony Blair on May 2, 1997, when New Labour took over from the Conservatives: ‘And it will be a government that seeks to restore trust in politics in this country. That cleans it up, that decentralizes it, that gives people hope once again that politics is and always should be about the service of the public. And it shall be a government, too, that gives this country strength and confidence in leadership both at home and abroad, particularly in respect of Europe.’[…] It shall be a government rooted in strong values, the values of justice and progress and community, the values that have guided me all my political life. But a government ready with the courage to embrace the new ideas necessary to make those values live again for today’s world — a government of practical measures in pursuit of noble causes. That is our objective for the people of Britain.(2)’

And the following is part of the statement made by Gordon Brown upon arriving at 10 Downing Street on June 27, 2007:

‘As I have travelled round the country, and as I have listened I have learnt from the British people – and as Prime Minister I will continue to listen and learn from the British people – I have heard the need for change, change in our NHS, change in our schools, change with affordable housing, change to build trust in Government, change to protect and extend the British way of life. And this need for change cannot be met by the old politics.(3)’

Commenting on the recent, and well publicized visit by Margaret Thatcher to 10 Downing Street (see Steve Bell’s cartoon here), the following is the rather apt description offered by Simon Hoggart, one of the Guardian’s columnists: ‘I’m sure I’m not the only person to think of the end of [George Orwell’s] Animal Farm, when the pigs, now walking on two legs, have moved in with the humans. The other animals gaze through the windows at their masters: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig…but already it was too late to say which was which.“(4)’

References

1) Where nuclear energy is concerned, see for example, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2173016,00.html and http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/nuclear/the-consultation-stitch-up-20070920.) See also http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/press_releases/government_gm_consultation_21072006.html for a critique of the government’s consultation over GM crops. For a critique of the policy regarding the teaching of skills in universities, see my own post on ‘The UWE Experiment’.

2) see http://www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page8073.asp, accessed September 23, 2007.

3) see http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page12155.asp, accessed September 23, 2007.

4) see http://politics.guardian.co.uk/columnist/story/0,,2169811,00.html, accessed September 23, 2007.

Note: this is the third in a series of posts about Lord Justice Sedley’s BBC Interview:
Lord Justice Sedley’s BBC Interview:
1 Introductory Comments
2 The Confusion of Powers
3 Lord Justice Sedley’s (and John Humphrys’) ‘Common Sense’
4 McNulty’s Genie (or the power of quasi-ecumenical debate)

Metaphors are commonly regarded as being little more than literary devices, as ways of embellishing one’s writing. But philosophers of language have long known that everyday metaphors are also something akin to fundamental cognitive frames, i.e. ‘ways of knowing’, if not ways of worldmaking that subtly shape how people begin to imagine and relate to whatever their metaphors represent.

(Note: The following post refers to the interview given by Lord Justice Sedley to the BBC’s Today programme on September 5, 2007. The post is unlikely to make much sense unless you listen first to that interview. Alternatively, you may wish to read my transcription of the interview)

During the BBC interview, Lord Justice Stephen Sedley uses a very simple directional metaphor, in fact a metaphor of dualistic directionality. This metaphor is meant to both describe, and moralize what he sees as two options with respect to the universal DNA database: ‘going forwards’ or ‘going backwards’. When queried by the BBC journalist Danny Shaw about what should be done about the DNA database he says, ‘Well you’ve certainly got to go in one direction or another from where we are now. [Coughs] To go backwards would be to wipe from the database the DNA of everybody who has not been convicted’(emphasis added). A few sentences later he says ‘So going backwards would be a disaster. Going forwards has very serious but I think, um, manageable implications’(emphases added again).

Sedley’s use of this metaphor sets what might well be described as two metaphorical traps for the journalists and the listeners of the Today programme. The first involves accepting that the question regarding a universal DNA database is best described in terms of the simple dualism established by the metaphor: there are only two choices, ‘going forwards’ or ‘going backwards’. As an alternative, Sedley might well have used, for example, a financial metaphor: ‘when deciding how to deal with this situation, we must take several different factors into account’. Alternatively, he might have appealed to a metaphor drawn from biology: ‘When confronted with this inequity, it is tempting to give in to our baser instincts and to decide to add everyone to the DNA database…’. These examples hopefully illustrate how profoundly one’s choice of metaphors can shape how something is explained, and by implication, how it might be interpreted.

The second trap involves Sedley’s (and indeed the wider culture’s) moralization of the two directions. In Sedley’s case, the moralization is actually quite explicit: backwards is bad (a ‘disaster’) and forwards is, by implication, ‘good’; not a, but the way (forward).

So long as the radio audiences (and of course the journalists themselves) accept either one of these aspects—that the decision involves some kind of a journey or road on which it is only possible to go backwards or forwards, and that backwards is bad (or ‘ridiculous’ as Sedley puts it), then they have begun to be manipulated by Sedley’s common sense.

* * *

A word about common sense. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz once described common sense as a ‘large realm of the given and undeniable, a catalogue of in-the-grain-of-nature realities so peremptory as to force themselves upon any mind sufficiently unclouded to receive them.(1)’ Geertz was critical of the commonsensicality of common sense. He suggested that, far from being the kind of immediate or absolute ‘lived wisdom’ that it is reputed to be, common sense is best regarded as a ‘cultural system’—one that can and should be questioned.

In some contexts—most notably those involving physical scientific investigation—common sense has long been suspect. Scientists have always known that if common sense were no more (and no less) than common sense, then the Sun would still be spinning around the Earth, and Christopher Columbus and the rest of his mates would still be screaming as they fall endlessly from the edge of that tabula that the planet was supposed to be. (Actually, in those days it was probably not regarded as an endless fall; presumably one fell to hell, but we need not concern ourselves with this question here.)

The problem with common sense—a problem that pertains to us all—is that thanks in no small part to metaphors such as the one that Sedley employs, common sense seems to be not just a matter of the ‘obvious’, but also of the unquestionable. Whether he set out to do so or not, this is precisely the effect that Sedley achieved—at least with his BBC interviewers. ‘Going backwards’ (or ‘wiping’ the DNA database) is ‘ridiculous’ because some day someone might be convicted thanks to a DNA sample that has been prudently stored in that universal DNA database [Update: this is a perfect example of the consequentialist ethic that has long characterised New Labour's politics). As he puts it, ‘I’ve come across cases myself in which, uh, serial rapists have finally been caught only because their DNA was obtained following their arrest. Ah, they were acquitted by jurors who they managed to hoodwink…ah, subsequently, because their DNA was now on record, were able to be identified as the perpetrators of a number of earlier rapes.’

If this is so obviously and unquestionably the ‘way forward’, then perhaps we should contemplate any number of similarly extreme measures. Why not tag everyone electronically in case that they commit a crime in the future? Or why not have everyone report to the STHF’s—‘Short Term Holding Facilities’—that Tony McNulty wants to introduce to the UK’s shopping malls and city centres, say, twice a week? Surely it would be safest to make sure that anyone who has not yet been proven innocent—and even those that have been proven innocent—remain tagged just in case they commit a crime in the future, or just in case they are shown to have committed a crime in the past?

This reference to the burden of proof unmasks the real implication of Sedley’s, and indeed New Labour’s, proposal: in effect, New Labour is taking steps to invert the current burden of proof—innocent until proven guilty—such that in future everyone will be guilty until proven innocent. And that is precisely one of the features that characterises totalitarian regimes. In a police state, you remain guilty, or at any rate a suspect, until the day you are buried, or disappeared.

* * *

Of course, anyone can use this or that metaphor until the cows come home and it won’t make an iota of difference unless other people accept and start to echo the cognitive frame that is established by any given metaphor, or better yet, by a certain web of metaphors and their associated discourse(s).

This is exactly what begins to happen during the BBC interview. Variations of Sedley’s directional metaphor and its morality appear and reappear throughout the interview until the metaphor is given a final—and arguably decisive—fillip by John Humphrys. Consider the following excerpts:

Richard Thomas: ‘I think we have to think very long and very hard before going down the road of a universal DNA database’ (emphasis added). And later, ‘I think we have got ourselves into a situation where we have to move in different directions, that’s not to say we have to go all the way to having a universal DNA database…’ It is true that Thomas is modifying and making more complex the metaphor, not least by attempting to associate the ‘move’ to a potentially more negative vertical sense of directionality: go down the road of universal DNA database. He also suggests the possibility of moving in different directions.

Humphrys then asks Thomas, ‘But what’s a half-way house?’ This slightly different metaphor of journey arguably continues to reproduce the sense that, if nothing else, there is one road, and one road only that has to be taken, even if only half way to what implicitly becomes the ‘end’ of a full universal DNA database.

McNulty also uses the directional metaphor of journey, though admittedly, he weakens the frame of dual directionality. In one statement, he says, ‘…there’s a huge debate needed about where we go from where we are now, will the up to universality [unclear], and again, like Richard, I welcome the debate it is much needed.’ Then again, McNulty is, and must be at pains to differentiate his message from Sedley’s; otherwise, he’d arguably be letting the cat of the New Labour bag.

In the end it is Humphrys that really gives Sedley’s metaphor a good hard push. He responds to McNulty by saying: ‘So you can’t go back [chuckles] so obviously therefore … logic demands that you have to go forward.’

Several questions come to mind here: why does Humphrys chuckle? Also, why does he return not just to the metaphor of directionality, but implicitly, to Sedley’s moralization of that metaphor (going forward is not only ‘good’ but ‘logical’)? Indeed, how, when, and why does the common sense of Sedley’s position become a matter of ‘logic’, or of a ‘logical demand’?

* * *

Lest there be a misunderstanding: the point is not to argue that the use of certain common sense metaphors is enough, in and of itself, to secure the acquiescence of any or all listeners. Nor is it possible to communicate without metaphors, or even, without some appeal to common sense; on the contrary, we must agree with all those scholars who say that every word is, in itself, both the beginning and the end of a metaphorical process. To be sure, any form of rationality is always part of something akin to a cultural system; one that can never be entirely ‘rational’, and which is always held together at least in part by a ‘common sense’.

What this post is suggesting is firstly that Radio 4’s listeners deserved a rather better form of justification than they got from Sedley, i.e. one less based on an appeal to crudely orientational , and crudely moralising metaphors. It is also suggesting that if this appeal was reproduced by John Humphrys—and it clearly was—then on this level of analysis, too (see EcoLogics’ previous post for another level), the BBC has aided and abetted the ideological process that is being led by New Labour, and championed by Sedley.

Will New Labour succeed? The dilemma for Gordon Brown and his associates is that if the tabloidization of justice—and that is at least part of what all this is about—thrives by creating ever deeper discursive divides between ‘us’ (the ‘law abiding citizens’) and ‘them’ (the criminals), then a universal DNA database makes ‘all of us’ at one and the same time ‘one of them’: if Sedley prevails, we will all be treated, in principle if not in practice, as criminals-in-the-making. Now that’s good common sense, isn’t it?

In the next post, a last piece titled ‘McNulty’s Genie’, in which we will analyse the manner in which New Labour strives to give the impression that its policies are the result of broad consultation.

References

1) in C. Geertz (1985) ‘Common sense as a cultural system’, in Local Knowledge, New York: Basic Books, p. 73

Lord Justice Stephen Sedley chose a particularly strategic place and time to present his views about a universal DNA database.

Note: The following post refers to the interview given by Lord Justice Sedley to the BBC’s Today programme on September 5, 2007. The post is unlikely to make much sense unless you listen first to that interview. Alternatively, you may wish to read my transcription of the interview. Please also note that this post is the second in a series:

1 Introductory Comments
2 The Confusion of Powers (present post)
3 Lord Justice Sedley’s (and John Humphrys’) ‘Common Sense’
4 McNulty’s Genie (or the power of quasi-ecumenical debate)

An analysis of more recent coverage of the DNA database is available at The BBC and New Labour’s DNA Database.

For readers unfamiliar with the UK’s media institutions: the Today programme is broadcast on the BBC’s Radio 4 station Monday to Saturday from 6am to 9am. There is a news bulletin every half hour, with ‘in-depth’ news items in between each bulletin. According to the BBC’s own 2006/2007 annual report, Radio 4 had an average 15-minute weekly reach to adults aged 15+ of 18.7% or 9.3 million people (1). In 2006, the Today programme itself had approximately five and a half million listeners over its three hours (2); the number of listeners peaked between 7.30 and 8am.

This is, of course, a large audience. But the true significance of Sedley’s choice—if indeed it was his choice—lies not so much in the quantity of listeners, but in the people that reportedly tune in to the Today programme, and in the regard that they have for the programme’s ability to ‘set political agendas’(3). The BBC describes the Today programme as ‘the nation’s premier morning news programme’(4), and John Humphrys, its famous presenter, has recently gone so far as to say that it is the single most important programme that the BBC produces from the point of view of its impact and influence on the national debate (5). Whether this is true or not, it seems clear that listening to the programme is de rigueur for the UK’s political, economic and cultural establishment.

The slot between 8.10 and 8.25 is usually reserved for an in-depth interview with what the programme editors regard as the most important social, political or economic figures of the day. It was this slot that was requested by—or perhaps given to—Lord Justice Sedley. The interviews in this slot are typically prefaced by an introductory comment by the programme’s leading presenter (one of two in each programme). The interview itself may then adopt one of several different modalities: a live interview in studio; a live interview that is conducted remotely (away from the studio); an in-depth analysis by a specialist journalist followed by an interview with a relevant individual or group; or a pre-recorded interview that is broadcast at 8.10. Sedley chose the last and the safest of these options; instead of running the risk of being subjected to the vicissitudes of real time questioning, he opted for the ‘controlled conditions’ of a pre-recorded interview. This presumably would have allowed him to re-record any unclear or awkwardly phrased statements before they were broadcast.

While some interviews are structured as one-on-one sessions for the duration of the slot (usually between 10 and 15 minutes), others are followed by the intervention of commentators whose role is ostensibly to debate what the initial interviewee has just said. In the case of the Sedley interview, the editors of the Today programme chose two people who, on the face of it, should have been in a good position to comment on Sedley’s intervention: Tony McNulty is the UK’s Minister of State for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing, and so directly responsible for the government’s policymaking vis-à-vis the DNA database. As I reported in another post, McNulty signed off a review of the UK’s criminal evidence procedures which supported the extension of DNA sampling for all real or alleged offences, however minor. For his part, Richard Thomas is the UK’s ‘Information Commissioner’. He heads the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which is ‘sponsored’ by the Department of Justice, and which describes itself as ‘the UK’s independent public body set up to promote access to official information and protect personal information by promoting good practice, ruling on eligible complaints, providing information to individuals and organisations, and taking appropriate action when the law is broken.’(6)

The interviews in the Today programme are usually structured on the basis of an adversarial logic: the advocates of opposing views are juxtaposed and frequently encouraged to enter not just into debate, but to do so in an antagonistic manner. John Humphrys is perhaps the presenter who is most strongly identified with this tradition; the BBC’s profile describes him as a ‘tough and tenacious’ interviewer(7), and indeed during one interview Humphrys famously interrupted a former Tory minister 32 times.

* * *

The BBC’s editorial guidelines suggest that the BBC is committed to impartiality. According to the BBC, this means that, amongst other things, the corporation seeks to provide ‘a properly balanced service consisting of a wide range of subject matter and views broadcast over an appropriate time scale across all our output’; to ‘reflect a wide range of opinion and explore a range and conflict of views so that no significant strand of thought is knowingly unreflected or under represented’; to ‘produce content about any subject, at any point on the spectrum of debate as long as there are good editorial reasons for doing so’; to ‘explore or report on a specific aspect of an issue or provide an opportunity for a single view to be expressed, but in doing so we do not misrepresent opposing views. They may also require a right of reply’. The Corporation aims to ‘ensure [that] we avoid bias or an imbalance of views on controversial subjects’. Indeed, the BBC goes so far as to say that its ‘journalists and presenters, including those in news and current affairs, may provide professional judgments but may not express personal opinions on matters of public policy or political or industrial controversy’ and ‘[o]ur audiences should not be able to tell from BBC programmes or other BBC output the personal views of our journalists and presenters on such matters’(8).

These guidelines reflect the BBC’s commitment to what might be described as a traditional discourse on the nature of journalism. A good journalist, or rather the news that s/he produces, is accurate, balanced, includes where appropriate a diversity of views, and does so in a manner that is not prejudiced by any bias, or by the personal views of the journalist.

While this discourse has been comprehensively critiqued by a number of scholars (see for example, Stuart Allan’s News Culture), there is still much to be said for it; we have only to consider the alternative posed by Fox News (9) to realise how vitally important it is to try to produce impartial, or something like impartial accounts, in news reporting.

The problem is that editorial guidelines such as the BBC’s are of course no guarantee of impartiality—for the BBC, or for any other news organisation. On the one hand, and staying within the logic of the guidelines, journalism is always susceptible to external manipulation, to mistakes or bias incurred thanks to the pressures of time or the limitations of space, and indeed to ‘internal’ manipulation by ‘biased’ journalists. From a more critical perspective, the guidelines are based on relatively naïve understandings of the nature of the production, dissemination, and social reception of knowledge by way of the media of mass communication. Modern societies and the issues that emerge in them tend to be so complex that there may well be far more perspectives than a journalist can ever know, understand, or report in any given case or subject. To be sure, the finite nature of a journalist’s, or indeed of a team of journalists’ knowledge means that s/he/they will necessarily bring to bear a certain perspective to whatever aspects they do manage to cover. Practical constraints to do with generic formulae, the amount of space or time available to produce a piece, the political and economic interests of the news organisations and their bureaucracies are not a matter of exception. On the contrary, they are the structural conditions under which, and with which journalists must work to produce news.

This post is not the place to engage in a detailed critique of journalistic conventions. It must suffice to suggest that, in practice, the aforementioned constraints force journalists to be selective, and thereby reductive with respect to the range and number of points of view that they represent. Those that they do choose will reflect, however indirectly, the ‘biases’ of their own knowledge and/or experience. Put differently, journalists’ representations will always exclude or misrepresent at least some views or perspectives.

Unfortunately, these ‘structural’ limitations are not necessarily evident to all listeners of the Today programme, and I fear they may not have been evident to a majority of the listeners during Sedley’s interview. I have undertaken to explain how and why this is the case in a series of articles in this blog; in this post I would like to focus on the way in which the selection and framing of the participants meant that, for a majority of listeners, the interview may well have worked not so much to scrutinize Lord Sedley’s proposal, but to legitimate his intervention.

In order to explain how this is the case, it is necessary to consider first some aspects of the legal and political context in which Sedley intervenes. In particular, the separation of powers, or rather, the absence of a separation of powers in the UK. While the courts in the UK are certainly independent, the court of final appeal is made up of Law Lords who sit in the upper house of parliament (the House of Lords). And of course, the prime minister, his cabinet and junior ministers form at once a part of the government and of the parliament (the legislative chamber). Plans are afoot to create a separate ‘supreme court’ in the UK, and this change is justified, at least officially, as a way of ensuring a certain separation of powers. Note, though, that no similar concern seems to exist vis-à-vis the possibility that there might be an analogous conflict of interest concerning the fusion of the executive and legislative branches.

Why is this relevant to the interview? The interview’s overall structuring reflects what is actually a fusion, or rather, a confusion of powers in the UK. Strictly speaking, it ought to be Jacqui Smith, the Home Office Secretary, or Tony McNulty, her Minister of State for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing, who propose a universal DNA database. Had s/he done so—and of course neither did—we might well have expected that the Today programme would have devoted the initial part of the interview to an interrogation of the secretary or her minister. That interrogation might then have been followed up by critical analyses by MPs, judges, or other relevant figures. Alternatively, the interview might have been structured from beginning to end (as per the adversarial logic I mentioned earlier) as a debate between Tony McNulty and John Humphrys, or a three-way debate between these two and, say, Richard Thomas.

But of course, it was the judge that proposed the extension of the controversial methods of policing, and so the editors were confronted with—I am assuming they themselves did not create—a situation in which there was, in effect, a role reversal. Sedley co-opted, however momentarily, the role, if not of the Home Office or of the police per se, then certainly of policing. In effect, he abandoned his role as an arbiter of justice to make a plea for a particular form of policing.

Even if one is critical of the idea of the separation of powers—and certainly the Bush administration has provided us with a lesson on the limitations of the Baron de Montesquieu’s three-way model—Sedley’s intervention raises any number of questions about his capacity to deal with DNA evidence in an impartial manner. If the case of the McCanns teaches us anything, it is that one police officer’s ‘absolute’ conviction that a DNA sample proves something is a forensic specialist’s caution that DNA, on its own, proves nothing (10). Can a judge who has declared so openly that DNA is the only ‘way forward’ really be trusted to remain impartial in any future case whose outcome hinges on contested DNA evidence?

Whether one thinks so or not, this entire aspect of Lord Justice Sedley’s intervention was overlooked by the journalist (Danny Shaw), by John Humphrys, and by the Today programme’s editors. This needn’t have been the case, unless the editors themselves asked Sedley to give the interview ‘out of the blue’—a possibility which would raise significant questions about the editors’ impartiality. Assuming that it was Sedley who approached the BBC, then the Today editors might , for example, have prefaced the Sedley interview with an in-depth analysis by the BBC’s legal correspondent about the extraordinary nature of his intervention from a judicial point of view. Why was a judge taking such a strong position in regard to matters concerning policing, and what were the implications of his intervention for criminal justice in a parliamentary democracy? What would happen if, say, judges routinely came out to recommend the use of new-generation tasers to apprehend criminals, or indeed to recommend the privatization of jails?

Instead, the journalists on the Today programme chose to probe the judge on alternatives to his proposal for a universal DNA sample, and on the practicality of obtaining DNA samples from people visiting the country ‘over the weekend’. While these two aspects are certainly not unimportant, the absence of any analysis of the nature and legitimacy of the judge’s intervention qua intervention constitutes the programme’s second-most glaring omission.

What, then, is the most glaring omission? The interview’s structure clearly positions McNulty, the Minister of State for Policing, as a kind of commentator on someone else’s proposal. Even when Humphrys gently asks McNulty if he ‘broadly’ agrees with Sedley’s proposal—note that Humphrys hesitates when he formulates the question—McNulty answers in a manner that arguably conceals his true role and interest in the matter. As I explained in my post about the Gattacaization of the UK’s criminal justice system, McNulty is one of the New Labour figures who is either championing, or at the very least, endorsing the backdoor institution of a universal DNA database. The reader might well argue that I have not really presented any direct evidence for this; but it is well within the power of McNulty, Jacqui Smith, and indeed Gordon Brown himself to order the police to stop collecting DNA samples from people who have not been convicted of any crime. In the absence of such an order, we have to assume that all three are complicit in what Sedley himself describes as an ‘indefensible’ state of affairs: collecting DNA samples from a growing number of people who have either not been convicted of any crime, or whom are not even suspected of any crime.

This fundamental point is glossed over by the programme’s positioning of McNulty as a kind of commentator on Sedley’s proposal. McNulty himself does nothing to clearly correct this impression: when asked if he agrees with Sedley’s proposal, he says ‘Oh there is, there is a logic to what Sir Stephen is saying and I’ve said that myself in the past that, ah there is a real logic and cohesion to the point that says well put everybody on it. But I think he probably does underestimate the practicalities, logistics, and huge civil liberties and ethics issues around that…’. This, and several other of McNulty’s answers, arguably work to position McNulty as a demi-sceptic, somebody who can ‘see a certain logic’ in the proposal, but who thinks that there are ‘huge’ practical, logistical, civil liberties and ethics (sic) ‘issues’ (note the order in which these are stated). If these ‘issues’ are really that ‘huge’, why hasn’t McNulty—or indeed the rest of the New Labour government—stopped the police from collecting the samples of witnesses and suspects who have been acquitted of wrongdoing, or who never were charged or even suspected in the first place?

Again, this is a matter that Humphrys could easily have probed. In his first question to McNulty, he might well have begun by saying, ‘Tony McNulty, you have commenced a review of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) which proposes to take DNA samples from individuals suspected of committing any offences, including so-called ‘minor’ offences such as speeding on the highways. Your department is even proposing to set up special facilities in shopping malls and other city centre sites where the DNA samples might be taken from alleged offenders. Why aren’t you the person that is proposing the universal DNA database? Surely that’s your role, and not Lord Justice Sedley’s?’

The only interviewee who is left to critique the proposed extension—and indeed the overall frame of the BBC interview—is the UK’s ‘Information Commissioner’, Richard Thomas. He ought to have been well positioned to do so; this is his official role, and indeed Thomas has warned repeatedly about the UK sleepwalking into a ‘surveillance society’(11). Instead, and most regrettably, by the time that Thomas himself is interviewed (after Sedley), he is caught up in, and appears unable to stop the discursive pincer movement that the programme editors’ have generated, inadvertently or not, by way of their selection and presentation of the participants’ views. Even before he’s started speaking, Thomas must extricate himself from a rhetorical trap—a trap of ‘common sense’—that Sedley has laid for him and anyone else who might oppose the universal DNA database: if, as Sedley argues, the current situation is ‘indefensible’, and if the only way ‘forward’ is to create a universal DNA database, then by implication anyone who opposes Sedley is either defending the ‘indefensible’, or going ‘backward’.

Instead of beginning by questioning how and why Sedley has intervened in this matter in the first place, Thomas begins by agreeing that the current situation is indeed ‘indefensible’(and so it is). Thomas is probably at once adopting the codes of politeness (finding ‘common ground’) and trying to reinforce the one aspect of Sedley’s intervention that he agrees with. Unfortunately, the rest of his intervention is rather weak. Thomas not only fails to comment on the fact that it is a judge that has called for more draconian forms of policing, but does little more than call for tighter rules on the retention of DNA samples, and for a wider debate on the subject. Indeed, it is John Humphrys who reminds Thomas of some of the more controversial issues associated with the database (e.g. including children in the database).

There is another aspect that Thomas also fails to address: as the Government’s leading expert on data protection, he must know that New Labour is not just ‘broadly’ in favour of a universal DNA database. However, he chooses not to confront McNulty, or indeed the Today show, on this aspect. True, when Thomas is questioned, McNulty himself has not yet been interviewed (this too, raises questions about the BBC’s editorial decisions: why wasn’t the person with the most critical role the last one to speak? Or why wasn’t Thomas allowed to comment on McNulty’s intervention?) But this does not entirely explain the relatively weak character of Thomas’ intervention. Is this his first time on the Today programme? Or could it be that his comments reflect the peculiarly disempowered position that he inhabits as ‘Information Commissioner’? (He is, on the one hand, supposed to be a kind of watchdog or ombudsman. But he is of course appointed by the government of the day, and indeed his office is ‘sponsored’ by the Justice Department.) In what looks to be a kind of Freudian slip, or at least an apparent contradiction, one of the pages on the ICO website suggests that ‘The ICO is the UK’s independent public body set up to promote access to official information and protect official information.’(12) This raises the question: does the ICO seek to promote access to, or to protect official information? Here too, one has to wonder whether the ‘fusion’ of powers in the UK is not better described as a confusion of powers.

* * *

This very brief analysis is meant to begin to reveal the extent to which, far from being the kind of ‘impartial’ and ‘balanced’ account that it is supposed to be, the Today’s interview of Lord Justice Sedley might well be described as a form of dissimulation — in the sociological sense of the term. As noted by John B. Thompson in Ideology and Modern Culture, dissimulation is one modus operandi of ideology which works to establish or sustain relations of domination by concealing, denying, obscuring or representing them in ways that deflect attention away from them (13).

Let me be very clear: I am not saying that John Humphrys did not ask some good questions. On the contrary, he did ask some tough questions, and the interview did succeed in providing significant insights into the discourse of Lord Justice Sedley. However timidly, Danny Shaw did also confront Lord Justice Sedley with the absurdity —or rather, the impracticality today— of his proposal.

Nor am I saying that the Today interview was partial or biased in any simple way. No, what is at stake is a rather more ‘structural’ form of ‘bias’, one that has to do with the way in which the entire interview positioned —read, framed— the different participants vis-à-vis Sedley’s intervention, vis-à-vis each other, and vis-à-vis McNulty’s and New Labour’s interest in introducing a universal DNA database. In effect, the Today editors structured the entire interview in a manner that failed to reveal and scrutinize the politics that underpinned Sedley’s and McNulty’s interventions.

It might be argued that, if my analysis is valid, then the editors are not at fault insofar as they have been the victims of a maneuver hatched, if not by Lord Justice Sedley himself, then by New Labour politicians. But that is like saying that journalists cannot help it if they are lied to. In a society where journalists know all too well that they are the continually the objects of spin and of efforts by politicians to control their interpretations, it is the journalists’ duty to stop and think, as a matter of course, about the kinds of issues that I have raised. If they don’t get it right the first time, that’s fair enough. But if they don’t, then nothing bars them from revisiting the subject a second, third or fourth time. Why not invite McNulty back for an interview in which the above matters are discussed? And as part of that, why not make public—very public—the contents of that PACE review?

By way of a postscript, a question for the ICO: is there not an unacceptable conflict of interest in the fact that one of the ICO’s non-executive directors is, has been, or might in future once again become a non-executive director of the Forensic Science Service Ltd, the private-public company that describes itself as a world leader in the development of DNA databases? See http://www.forensic.gov.uk/forensic_t/i3/index.htm, and also http://www.shareholderexecutive.gov.uk/performance/fss.asp (accessed September 14, 2007) where David Clarke remains listed as a non-executive director.

On Tuesday: “Lord Justice Sedley’s (and John Humphrys’) ‘Common Sense’”

References

1) As per the BBC Annual Reports and Accounts 2006/2007 (Executive Report), p.41. http://www.bbc.co.uk/annualreport/, accessed September 12, 2007. According to this same document, ‘average weekly reach for radio is measured by the number of people aged 15+ who tune to a radio station within at least one quarter-hour period over the course of a week. Radio listeners only need to have listened to the station for at least five minutes within that quarter-hour (RAJAR)’. (RAJAR is the Radio Joint Audience Research and describes itself as the official body in charge of measuring radio audiences in the UK.)
2) as per Julia Day, ‘Today bears brunt as Radio 4 slumps’, http://media.guardian.co.uk/rajars/story/0,,1836176,00.html, accessed September 12, 2007.
3) In 2005, Broadcast magazine suggested that MPs voted the Today programme as the most influential programme in setting the political agendas. See ‘BBC News Tops MPs’ Survey’ at http://news.bbc.co.uk/newswatch/ukfs/hi/newsid_4440000/newsid_4444700/4444751.stm, accessed September 12, 2007.
4) BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2006/2007, p. 41.
5) ‘In terms of its impact and its influence on the national debate, the trust in which it is held by its huge audience, the Today programme is easily the most important programme that the BBC does.’ In ‘John Humphrys: On the threat to ‘Today’’ in Independent Online, September 3, 2007, http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article2919835.ece. Accessed September 12, 2007.
6) ICO website, http://www.ico.gov.uk/about_us.aspx, accessed September 13, 2007.
7) http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/about/meet/pres.shtml?humphrys, accessed September 13, 2007.

8)BBC Editorial Guidelines on Impartiality. http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/edguide/impariality/, accessed September 13, 2007.
9) see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies, accessed September 14, 2007.
10) ‘DNA expert in McCann case offer’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6992372.stm, accessed September 14, 2007.
11) ‘Britain is Surveillance Society’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6108496.stm, accessed September 12, 2007.
12) http://www.ico.gov.uk/about_us/who_we_are.aspx, accessed September 12, 2007.
13) Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990, p. 62.

Note: The following post refers to the interview given by Lord Justice Sedley to the BBC’s Today programme on September 5, 2007. Before reading this post, you may wish to listen to that interview; alternatively, you may wish to read my transcription of the interview.

My first post about the Gattacaization of criminal justice in the UK drew a comparison between the near-future society described in Gattaca (the film produced by Andrew Niccol in 1997), and the kind of society that New Labour is arguably trying to institute by way of the back-door introduction of universal DNA sampling. Like many other people in the UK, I was concerned that New Labour is creating a de facto universal DNA database by taking and then keeping DNA samples from everyone that, in the delicate expression of one of its ministers, encounters the criminal justice system. This includes not only suspects who may later be acquitted, but even the witnesses of crimes, and children: as noted by John Humphrys in the interview itself, there are some 24,000 children on the DNA database. (An article in the Guardian reported that in fact the database had 883,888 records of children between 10-17 years old).

Then, on September 5, something extraordinary happened: Sir Stephen Sedley, a judge in the UK’s appeals court, gave an interview on the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme, and effectively crossed the line that nominally separates the different powers (executive, judiciary, legislative) to become the most important advocate yet of New Labour’s hitherto unacknowledged plans to introduce a universal DNA database.

My first thought when I read about the news, which were first broadcast in the BBC interview but which were then reported in other media, was that this was a very clever attempt to flush the government out of its DNA lair. By calling for a universal DNA database, Lord Justice Sedley might well force the government to come clean about its intentions; ministers would have to agree or disagree with him, and so a proper debate might well begin that would let people know about the government’s true intentions.

This may yet be one of the consequences of the interview, and of its subsequent coverage. However, when I took advantage of the BBC’s ‘Listen Again’ function (I missed the original broadcast), transcribed and began to analyse the interview, it became apparent that my first assessment was almost certainly an instance of wishful thinking. The arguments deployed by Sedley, his choice of metaphors, and crucially, the frame produced by the discussion that followed between John Humphrys (the BBC Today presenter), Richard Thomas (the UK’s Information Commissioner), and Tony McNulty (Minister of State for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing), were arguably the most misleading defence mounted thus far of the idea of a universal DNA database.

Unfortunately, someone not familiar with the background and the rhetorical strategies of the different participants, or indeed with the characteristic media discourse of the Today programme, might come away thinking that this was an enlightening and above all ‘unbiased’ interview. Indeed, it might well have seemed that the BBC more than fulfilled its social function as the ‘fourth estate’ by giving Sedley a chance to broadcast his views, and by then having a thorough debate about the issues that the views raised.

Over the following week, I intend to use my expertise in anthropology, linguistics and sociology to explain why this was not the case. I will analyse several aspects of the interview in a series of posts whose subjects will range from the role of common sense in everyday life, to the choice of linguistic structures employed by the different participants. As part of the above, I will offer an analysis of the characteristic ways in which the Today programme framed the debate. One of the objectives of this blog is to show the complex ways in which media institutions such as the BBC’s Today programme affect the ecology of our everyday politics, and so I will be particularly interested in investigating the role of the programme’s format and of the journalists’ ways of conducting the interview.

Note: the following is a list of the posts that make up this series:

Lord Justice Sedley’s BBC Interview:
1 Introductory Comments
2 The Confusion of Powers
3 Lord Justice Sedley’s (and John Humphrys’) ‘Common Sense’
4 McNulty’s Genie (or the power of quasi-ecumenical debate)