Is authoritarianism on ebb in the UK?

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, 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, perhaps, that it’s a vote looser. Perhaps senior New Labour politicians must be having quiet talks with the companies lobbying hardest for the database (this blogger wonders if Entrust and other digital security corporations are behind the whole scheme), 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 may 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 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.

‘Blunkett’s Law’ and the Inland Revenue’s catastrophic loss of information

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.

You and Your DNA

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.