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.

A short note to say that the news that Peter Mandelson is planning to slash spending on training for young people should come as a surprise to no one. New Labour’s educational policy—which is to say, its ‘skills’ policy, for education has long since become a bad word in New Labour circles—is premised on a species of consequentialism that is particularly susceptible to the wayward fluctuations of neoliberal politics.

Before the banking crisis, companies such as Carter & Carter successfully lobbied New Labour politicians for state ‘donations’ in the form of corporate welfare payments, and money flowed from the state into the bulging coffers of the burgeoning private FE/HE sector. But now that vast sums of state money have disappeared down the sinkholes of banks such as Lloyds and RBS, the claim will increasingly be that there is no money to be had for anything else—not even for projects that were once the darlings of New Labour’s ‘train to gain’ variety of clientelism. (Expeditionary wars such as those of Afghanistan or Iraq will continue to be excluded from the accounting because they make money for the merchants of death, and, like the Trident nuclear subs, have the cover of the sacred for British politicians who still cannot let go of a ‘glorious’ past).

EcoLogics wonders: what will happen in this brave new world of alleged scarcity to stalwart defenders of the New Lab skills faith such as Howard Newby? Will they now be busy stroking the Conservatives, in the hope of securing the continuation of the political conditions required for an on-going spirit of creation in higher and further education?

Whatever the case, the upshot is that a badly misguided, if not corrupt policy will be replaced by a return to good ‘ole Thatcherite slash—and—burnism. And like the Tory grandees who were ousted from power in 1997, Peter Mandelson, Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and the rest of the New Labour nomenklatura will be voted out, but will also retire to corporate adviserships, the writing of ‘memoirs’, and perhaps the odd bit of TV presenting for the BBC or ITV, à la Michael Portillo.

The future is bright, isn’t it? But it certainly isn’t orange.

You can always tell when Rupert Murdoch, or one of his proxies, needs to undermine a view that runs against his/their right-wing ideology. It’s what this blogger describes as rottweiler journalism. For a good example, see the headline below:

Murdoch doesn't like David Nutt

Note how the picture is not only at the top of the article, but actually implies, by way of the caption, that the photo is of Nutt himself, ergo Nutt is a drug user. It doesn’t get less subtle than that, does it? For an analysis of similar tricks over at the Guardian, see The Guardian and Peter Mandelson.

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.

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.

(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

When this blog published its first post (‘Speaking Out’, August 15, 2007), it used the example of the life of Martin Niemöller in pre-WWII Germany to say something about the circumstances of people who, like this blogger, live in the UK in 2007. As explained towards the end of that post, there was no intention to suggest that Britain in 2007 was the same as Germany in 1937 (the year that Niemöller was arrested by the Gestapo). The article did, however, wish to repeat Niemöller’s warning that authoritarianism and totalitarianism only seem to affect ‘others’ in the early days. The post was also written to remind those familiar with Niemöller’s poem that Niemöller himself continued to be a defender of fascism even after he had been sent to a concentration camp. As the article noted, one can be complicit with an authoritarian or totalitarian regime despite being a fierce critic of some of its aspects.

We will return to this last point below. Here it should also be reiterated that the social context that the first post had in mind was that of the UK, and not of Germany in the early 21st century. The reasoning was that, after all, it is the UK that can now imprison people for 28 days without charge, and it is Gordon Brown’s government that is trying to extend this period to 56 days. EcoLogics is not naïve about the extent of the erosion of civil liberties across much of Europe, but it did seem clear that the New Labour, along with the Bush administration, was on the cutting edge, if one can call it that, of what another post described as the ‘Gattacaization’ of society.

But then on August 20th, news about an event in Germany forced this blogger to revise this assessment. As reported by the Guardian, Andrej Holm, a lecturer specializing in the sociology of urban gentrification, was one of several people arrested in Berlin in early August on suspicion of associating with a terrorist group:

‘The federal prosecutor’s office arrested Mr Holm on August 1 under paragraph 129a of the anti-terrorism law, citing the repeated use of words such as “gentrification” and “inequality” in his academic papers, terms similar to those used by the urban activist organisation “militante gruppe” (mg). According to the prosecution report the frequency of the overlap between words used by Mr Holm and the group was “striking, and not to be explained through a coincidence”.’(1)

A letter of protest signed by leading academics and sent to the Federal Prosecutor noted the absurd nature of this and other justifications used to arrest the different people:

‘One of the justifications, which the construct of the Federal Prosecutor is based on, is the fact that three of the seven accused are social scientists who are said to be intellectually capable to “author the sophisticated texts of the ‘militante gruppe’”. The political scientist Matthias B., holding a PhD, is a suspect because “as associate of a research institute he has access to libraries which he may use inconspicuously in order to do the research necessary to draft texts of the ‘militante gruppe’”. One of the four imprisoned, Dr. Andrej Holm, is alleged “to have been active in the resistance mounted by the extreme left-wing scene against the 2007 World Economic Summit in Heiligendamm” (G8), and to have met with one of the other suspects “in a conspiratorial manner”. One of the other accused individuals is deemed to be a “terrorist” because an address list was found with him, including the name of Dr. Andrej Holm.’(2)

It may be that this event is something like an aberrant exception in Germany. But even if it is, and indeed even if the police have further evidence which they have not made public(3), the fact that the Federal Prosecutor felt able to justify the detention in the manner that s/he did suggests that Germany too, is becoming a state in which even the flimsiest of ‘associations’—don’t even try to call it ‘evidence’—can be used to try to detain and silence someone. One might almost say that detention with such charges is as bad as detention without charge; except, of course, that that is precisely why detention should always be made with charges. It is only when charges are made public that one is able to begin to scrutinize the workings of the police and the judiciary.

* * *

Events such as these—and EcoLogics speaks in the plural because numerous other cases might be considered throughout the supposedly free world, the most recent of which involved an Indian doctor in Australia (4)—suggest that anybody who writes and publishes anything that is critical of the prevailing ideology has reason to be worried—very worried—about the kind of ‘evidence’ that might be concocted against them if a government decides to pursue them. The prosecutor’s reference to the use of libraries reminds this blogger of the Patriot Act, which is even allowing the US government to spy on the books taken out by people from public libraries. The public or private use of any other medium—including, of course, the internet—is fair game in societies that are arguably increasingly driven by a veritable proliferation of panoptical systems.

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

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

‘To save the troublesome exertion of voice that might otherwise be necessary, and to prevent one prisoner from knowing that the inspector was occupied by another prisoner at a distance, a small tin tube might reach from each cell to the inspector’s lodge, passing across the area, and so in at the side of the correspondent window of the lodge. By means of this implement, the slightest whisper of the one might be heard by the other, especially if he had proper notice to apply his ear to the tube.’(5)

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

‘to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.’(6)

* * *

Even if Bentham’s proposed jail was never actually realised, a strong case can be made that those who live in the UK and perhaps now also in Germany must contend with a form of societal organisation that reproduces many aspects of the logic described by Foucault. The use in Britain and Europe of CCTV cameras, apparently in every street corner, restaurant, shop and institution; the ubiquitous news about yet another state database (DNA, internet use, etc.) to be used ostensibly to track criminality or terrorists, and of course the efforts to track mobile phones might all be conceived as examples of panopticism in our own times.

In the absence of an actual jail or building such as the one proposed by Bentham, panopticism depends on a mixture of ubiquotous surveillance systems, and the occasional ‘pedagogic moment’, for example, well-publicised detentions such as Andrej Holm’s. The detentions work to encourage the population to assume that they too, might be observed. This process is extraordinarily insidious in so far as it leads individuals or groups to engage in self-censorship, and/or in the policing of others.

Imagine, for example, that someone you know asks to use your PC to access the internet. You don’t think twice about lending your PC until the person lets you know that s/he has visited sites that you realise might make you a special target of surveillance. At that point you understand that the person, or rather the political order that governs the society, has put you in the unacceptable position of having to choose between respecting the person’s freedom of speech, or asking her/him to stop using your computer in order to protect your own freedom of speech.

If you choose the latter stance then you become a kind of censor, and in one sense at least, a de facto agent of the very regime you might otherwise critique. But if you choose the former, then you allow the person to potentially create the circumstances whereby you yourself might be framed and censored. To be sure, merely by raising the matter you also risk being branded as being paranoid. Everyone is being watched, the person might say, so best not to worry about it.

When confronted with this logic, one is reminded of the story of George Orwell, whom many would regard as the theorist of social paranoia, par excellence. But today it emerged that Orwell was himself being watched by the British police and intelligence services. Amongst many other comments found in the documents released by the UK’s National Archives at Kew is the following gem, written by a policeman who spied on Orwell in the 1940s: ‘This man [Orwell] has advanced communist views… He dresses in a bohemian fashion both at his office and in his leisure hours’(7).

The 1940s might seem like a long time ago. But note the bald title with which the National Archive has presented the archives: ‘Communists and Suspected Communists’[8]. Upon reading this archive, we have to ask, ‘Who is being spied upon today?’ A better question might be, ‘Will the title of future archives be “Terrorists and Suspected Terrorists”?’ And what if any asinine attitudes will be revealed about today’s surveillance operations?

References

(1) Kate Connolly. ‘Protests over terror arrest of German academic’. In Guardian Unlimited, August 20, 2007. http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/article/0,,2152984,00.html, accessed September 4, 2007.
(2) Open Letter to the Federal Prosecutor. http://einstellung.so36.net/en/pm/78, accessed September 4, 2007.
(3) A suggestion made by several bigoted responses to the comment offered by Richard Sennett and Saskia Sassen in ‘The war on shapeless terror’, August 21, 2007, Guardian Unlimited, http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/richard_sennett_and_saskia_sassen/2007/08/the_war_on_shapeless_terror.html, accessed September 4, 2007.
(4) See ‘Cleared doctor leaves Australia’ in BBC News, 29 July 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6920344.stm, accessed September 4, 2007.
(5) J. Bentham, ‘Panopticon; or the Inspection-House’ in The Panopticon Writings, Ed. By Miran Bozovic (London, 1995), and reproduced in http://www.cartome.org/panopticon2.htm, accessed September 4, 2007.
(6) emphasis added. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (NY: Vintage Books 1995) p. 196. For a longer quotation, see http://www.cartome.org/foucault.htm, accessed September 4, 2007.
(7) Cahal Milmo, ‘Big brother: How M15 kept watch on Orwell’ in Independent Online, September 4, 2007, http://arts.independent.co.uk/books/features/article2924398.ece.
[8]  http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/releases/2007/september/communists.htm?homepage=releases, accessed September 4, 2007.

What makes a university, a university? Or, to put it somewhat differently, when does a university stop being a university?

Since 2006, an experiment has been taking place in a university in Bristol, UK that may provide some answers to these questions, and which may have wide-ranging consequences for students and lecturers who value higher education as a place for independent teaching, learning, and research. The experiment involves the University of the West of England (UWE), one of the UK’s largest so-called ‘new’ universities. And the experiment is, at least in the first instance, the brainchild of Sir Howard and Sheila Newby. Howard Newby was the Vice-Chancellor (1) of UWE from 2006 to mid 2007, and his wife Sheila was made the Assistant Vice-Chancellor at more or less the same time. This article provides an introductory account of the Newbys’ experiment; EcoLogics will publish additional posts about this subject in the future. [Update: for all of the EcoLogics articles on this subject, see this blog's Higher Education category.]

* * *

We should perhaps begin with a brief history of what was arguably a failed recruitment process. In 2004/2005, UWE announced that it would be recruiting a new VC. After a first round of advertisements and interviews, staff at UWE were informed that the university had failed to find a suitable candidate. Several months later, the university announced with great fanfare that it had finally identified the new head, and that it would be Howard Newby. The first UWE press release described him as a progressive vice-chancellor: ‘Sir Howard has unparalleled experience of the University sector. Since October 2001, he has been the Chief Executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England and at the forefront of progress in the University sector(2)’. In the same press release, Newby himself was quoted as saying that he was ‘looking forward to taking up this exciting new challenge. Bristol UWE is well positioned to become a distinctive new kind of university for the twenty-first century, one which constantly strives for excellence in learning and teaching, knowledge transfer and the extension of educational opportunities to all who can benefit from it.’

It was thus surprising to hear that, less than 16 months after Newby took up his post, he would be leaving to become the VC at Liverpool University. Some staff at the university have speculated that this was always the Newbys’ plan. But many wondered if their sudden departure had something to do with the controversy that had begun to envelop Howard Newby. The GuardianEducation (3) reported that the Liverpool position was advertised in the first week of June 2007 with an application deadline two weeks later on June 15; apparently, UWE officially announced that Sir Howard would go to Liverpool less than a month later on July 6, the day after he informed the board of governors of his resignation. The same piece included sharply critical views by staff and former staff at UWE. A week or so before, the other major higher educational supplement in the UK, the THES, noted that the local branch of the University and Colleges Union (UCU) took the unprecedented step of issuing a damning statement: Newby’s tenure had been ‘disruptive for students and staff, disastrous for the morale of staff and damaging to the reputation of the university’(4). The shortest piece pointed to what was possibly the most embarrassing revelation: Private Eye, the magazine with the highest circulation in the UK, noted the potential conflict of interest raised by the fact that Newby had attempted to award a UWE contract to Carter & Carter, a provider of vocational training for which Newby is a non-executive director. It concluded by saying, with its characteristically acerbic humour, that ‘Life for Sir Howard at UWE just gets cosier and cosier. His Assistant Vice-Chancellor is none other than his wife, Sheila Newby’ (5).

EcoLogics will be publishing a separate piece about the Carter & Carter saga in due course. In this post it is more pertinent to analyse an aspect of the Newbys’ brief stay at UWE that seems to have eluded critical scrutiny in the media. The aspect involves the Newbys’ experiment with what they described as ‘knowledge exchange’ (KE). According to the UWE website, knowledge exchange is ‘the two-way flow of innovation or best practice, often involving an exchange of ideas and experience’. This glib definition is fleshed out a bit with references to ‘user-led’ research and consultancy, ‘effective and long-lasting relationships with businesses, public services and communities’, teaching and learning ‘for employability’, and ‘continuing professional development for lifelong learning’(6). These are arguably code words for a drastic vocationalization of teaching and learning at UWE—one that is to be implemented by way of the kind of management ethos normally found in large private corporations. In effect, Howard and Sheila were attempting to turn UWE into a kind of meta-business (a business about business)(7). One that would, in Howard Newby’s terms, be demand led by ‘UK Plc’.

The THES article reported that a UCU survey suggested the possibility of a UWE staff exodus, and there can be little doubt that KE was at least as important a factor for many staff as were concerns about the Newbys’ management style. This blogger resigned last spring after UWE attempted to muscle in on the copyright of research about science and environmental education. UWE’s corporate business department sent word that the principal investigator longer had control over the copyright of a database generated by way of ESRC-funded research on environmental education (significantly, the department in question was formerly called the Centre for Research, Innovation and Graduate Studies, and then Newby renamed it as RBI—Research, Business and Innovation). This writer was thereby bestowed the rather unfortunate honour of being one of the first people in the faculty of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences to be on the receiving end of what was for all practical purposes a new private corporate IP policy at UWE. At the time, and in the context of the humanities and social sciences at UWE, losing the copyright over one’s research was almost unheard of, so many of us assumed that there was some mistake. Efforts to contact first the dean of the faculty and then the new head of RBI (a Newby appointee) over a period of five or six weeks proved unsuccessful. There was no substantive response until Newby himself was approached. His polite reply, many weeks later, upheld the RBI’s ‘ruling’, but promised a review of the policy.

Eventually a worried colleague circulated a draft of the review. The review extended the university’s claims over IP, and, crucially, proposed that, when undertaking work from which IP, IPR might emerge on any materials covered by the new policy, we would have to notify the university immediately and in writing to inform it ‘about any innovation, invention, IP, IPR, exploitable technology or material created’. To do so we should use a new UWE ‘Invention and Material Disclosure Form’.

The proposed policy may or may not have been implemented; those of us who could left before it could be put into action. This blogger’s resignation seemed particularly paradoxical insofar as many of colleagues assumed that my research more than fulfilled the apparent ideals of KE. In fact, there is good reason to believe that, insofar as the research remained critical and independent, it went very much against the grain of KE.

* * *

A brief account of the political background of KE may help to explain how and why this is the case. The July 20, 2007 THES also included an article (‘Embrace Leitch or lose out to FE, sector warned’) which begins to provide a sense of the ideas which informed the Newbys’ UWE experiment. The article reported on the government’s plans to impose a ‘cultural revolution in higher education’. In it John Denham, Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, said that he wanted a ‘skills revolution’ and that employers would be given the ‘purchasing power to shape what our country supplies by way of skills and qualifications’. Richard Brown, chief executive of the Council for Industry and Higher Education, was also quoted as saying that if universities didn’t embrace this ‘revolution’, ‘then the private sector will continue to take this market. Universities have to decide how much of a loss that would be’[8]. The Council of Industry and Higher Education is funded by what reads like a who’s-who of the UK’s largest private corporations—the list includes BAE Systems, Corus, Rio Tinto, the Bank of Scotland, Tesco and BUPA(9). Interestingly, one of its council members is Drummond Bone, the current VC of Liverpool University(10).

While the invocation of a ‘cultural revolution’ in higher education may sound Maoist (11), the revolution is to be rather more prosaic in its aims, even if its politics do seem rather totalitarian. The aims are spelled out in Sandy Leitch’s grandly titled Review of Skills: Prosperity for all in the global economy-world class skills(12). An interim version of the report was published in December 2005, and the final version was published in December 2006. Sandy (Lord) Leitch is a New Labour peer, and at the time of the review was chairman of BUPA as well as a non-executive director of Lloyds TSB, United Business Media and Paternoster. Before that he was Chairman and Chief Executive of Zurich Financial Services (UK, Ireland, Southern Africa and Asia Pacific) and Chairman of the Association of British Insurers (13). According to the Guardian (‘Brown’s £113,000 war chest for the leadership contest that never was’) he was a donor for Gordon Brown’s virtual leadership contest (14), and indeed it was Brown that commissioned him to produce what became known as the Leitch Review in 2004. [Update: Leitch went on to become one of the leading directors of the part-nationalised Lloyds Banking Group, which at the height of the banking crisis was allowed to takeover HBOS despite the manifest issues regarding competition law.]

Despite—or perhaps thanks to—its social engineerism, the Review’s main argument is cutting edge KE: there is a ‘direct correlation between skills, productivity, and employment’ and ‘[u]nless the UK can build on reforms to schools, colleges and universities and make its skills base one of its strengths, UK businesses will find it increasingly difficult to compete.’ ‘Skills’, the review suggests, ‘were once a key lever for prosperity and fairness.’ But they ‘are now increasingly the lever’ and so ‘A radical step-change is necessary’. The Review concludes that the ‘prize for the country’ of unlocking the country’s ‘skills potential’ will be ‘enormous’: ‘higher productivity, the creation of wealth and social justice’(15).

This article is not the place for a critique of poor common sense. The management of higher education would be easy—and terrifying—if New Labour grandees like Leitch could pull, metaphorically or otherwise, on a single ‘lever’ to achieve whatever they want to achieve. Things acquire such a reifying simplicity when people reduce vastly complex and difficult matters to one single thing. In the case of the Leitch review, there is, however, a very clear motivation for representing things in this manner, and indeed one quote in the Review goes a long way in revealing the Review’s underlying ideology. After explaining that the UK’s ‘skills base’ lags behind that of many ‘advanced countries’ (sic), the Leitch Review suggests that this is ‘the product of historic failures in the education and training system’. It notes that ‘[e]ven back in 1776, Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” suggested that “the greater part of what is taught in schools and universities… does not seem to be the proper preparation for that of business”’(16).

This is where the Newbys come into the picture. New Labour appointed Howard as head of HEFCE in 2001, and the UWE post that followed provided Sheila and him with a guinea pig on which to conduct a grand KE experiment—UWE has some 30,000 students and 3,000 staff members. Along with vocationalization, the Newbys began to impose a root-and-branch rationalization. In less than two years, they decided to reduce the number of UWE faculties from nine to five. The Faculty of Humanities, Languages, and Social Sciences—itself the result of a recent and grossly mismanaged amalgamation of the three named fields—was to be merged with Business, Law, and Education. Few if any were keen on this rest-of-the-world merger; but, significantly, in the early planning stages it was only Business that was allowed to opt out of it.

The Newbys and their associates would have liked staff to believe that such changes constituted a ‘do or die’ ‘third way’. They would also have had staff believe that, despite the reductive nature of their aims, the new UWE would preserve an element of catholicity. It may well be that the sheer size of the organisation, and the impossibility of changing it overnight will preserve that ‘element’, if only for the time being. However, during a meeting this blogger had with John Rushforth, a Newby appointee entrusted with setting up what many staff mistakenly assumed would be new ‘research institutes’, it was made abundantly clear that Newby’s UWE was prepared to be inclusive so long as its staff were willing to be knowledge exchanged. Rushforth himself honestly admitted he had no experience of academic research.

* * *

The Newby (or post-Newby) management may well claim that it does value methodological pluralism. But its spin doctors will not be able to conceal a number of contradictions and risks that are inherent to KE.

First, and as Newby ruefully admitted in one of the talks he gave at my former faculty, UK corporate bosses do not seem to know what they actually need in the way of skills or ‘human resources’ –so much for being ‘demand led’ by ‘UK Plc’. This is actually unsurprising because as Leitch himself explains in his review, ‘No one can accurately predict future demand for particular skill types’(17) .

Second, one has to ask why the vocationalization of universities like UWE is necessary if a) there is already a very substantial further education (FE) sector in the UK; and b) if universities have in any case always included at least some professional disciplines such as law, engineering, and medicine. Will UWE really be charging higher education fees for an FE-like education? Or is there a plan to get the government off the expensive hook of fulfilling its pledges on the radical expansion of higher education by engaging in a de facto privatization of this emerging sector (further education as higher education, or vice-versa)?

But the most fundamental problem involves the independence of teaching, learning and research at UWE. The consequences of the KE experiment for this aspect of higher education are quite clear: the Newbys’ KE eliminates the crucially important boundary that has long provided some insulation for teaching, learning and research in universities. In principle if not always in practice, this boundary is what has allowed academics to engage in ‘blue skies’ thinking, and to invent things that initially may not have seemed to have any practical application. It is also what has long provided lecturers and researchers with some protection from the possibility of grossly distorting interventions by the Church, Government, and now, ‘UK Plc’.

Anyone doubting the wisdom of this approach may wish to consider what has happened to science, and science education in the United States over the past years [18]. While we have to hope that KE is not the thin end of a wedge of a similarly neoconservative politics, this is one possible outcome of the changes. Such a politics could not come at a worse time for the UK, and for Europe: we face the prospect of an environmental cataclysm that is arguably a consequence of economic fundamentalism, and in this context it must be an own-goal of epic proportions to downgrade or even suppress what Adam Smith might today welcome as ‘a preparation for that of the limits of big business’.

Newby and his associates would doubtless insist that KE is actually the solution to environmental problems, and might well wheel out a few choice examples of KE do-goodism. But that is a bit like saying that supporting Macdonald’s Hamburger University is the best way to help society to develop a new approach to obesity. Institutions like the Hamburger University or the Disney Institute are, no doubt, very useful to their corporate sponsors. They may well help their graduates to acquire ‘economically valuable skills’, and in so doing, to get jobs at least in their own industry. That is no mean feat, and certainly not one that should be taken for granted by any educator on any level. The problem is that they also render utterly disposable the ideal of university as a space for independent and critical thinking, a place for learning to question, as opposed to learning to obey.

But obedience is arguably what the changes are really about: for many years now, higher education has been one of the few mainstream spaces that has not been entirely determined by the political economy that both drives, and is sponsored by gigantic corporations such as the ones that fund the Council for Industry and Higher Education. The Newbys’ experiment at UWE marks a UK milestone insofar as it constitutes the first time that a major university, still organised as a public, and charitable entity, begins to be transformed into a private or quasi-private corporation devoted to providing services mainly for big business. That is why EcoLogics is including this and other posts on the vocationalisation, or ’skillification’ of higher education under the category of ‘weapons of mass silencing’.

A piece in the THES on 24 August 2007 noted that post-92 universities in the UK were investigating the possibility of giving up their charitable status in order ‘to give themselves more freedom to hire and fire staff and to expand their commercial activities’(19). The article quoted a lawyer specializing in providing advice on such changes as suggesting that ‘”The private sector has a much more flexible workforce.”’ If the Newbys and the rest of the private corporate proxies in the UK’s higher education have their way, perhaps that flexibility will extend to teaching, learning and research.

Note: after reading this post, readers may wish to see this follow-up post (the first of three) Lord Leitch’s Levers.

Additional information about the Newbys’ effort to develop a partnership with Carter and Carter can be found at ‘Carter & Carter goes into administration‘.

Soon after Newby arrived at his new post at Liverpool University, he tried to close down the departments in the subjects that most strongly opposed him at UWE: amongst them, politics and communication studies. Newby tried to justify the cuts by alleging that the departments were not performing well enough in research terms. Less noticed in the scandal that followed was Newby’s intention to divide his staff into those allowed to conduct research, and those forced to engage in knowledge exchange.

For a recent critique of the way in which the UK’s funding councils have started to be controlled by the corporate sector, see George Monbiot’s ‘Captive Knowledge’ at http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/05/12/captive-knowledge/

This blog’s Higher Education Archive allows you to access a number of updates since this blog was posted in the summer of 2007.

References

(1) In the UK, this is the name given to a university’s president or CEO (the Chancellor is a ceremonial role awarded to a prestigious figure).
(2) UWE press release, ‘Sir Howard Newby to head the West’s Largest University’, 8 September 2005. http://info.uwe.ac.uk/news/UWENews/article.asp?item=689&year=2005, accessed 13 August 2007.
(3) Anthea Lipsett, ‘Will the Newby Broom Sweep Clean?’, in http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/careers/story/0,,2132912,00.html?87%3A+Education+news, accessed July 24, 2007.
(4) Melanie Newman, ‘Mixed View’s on Howard’s End’, July 20, 2007. http://www.thes.co.uk/search/story.aspx?story_id=2037551
(5) Private Eye 1185, 25 May 7 June 2007.
(6) see UWE’s page on ‘knowledge exchange’ at http://www.uwe.ac.uk/aboutUWE/knowledgeTransfer.shtml, accessed August 24, 2007.
(7) The interim post-Newby UWE senior management, which will be led by Ray Burton, the chairman of UWE’s Board of Governors, have vowed to build on the Newbys’ legacy.
[8] All quotes taken from Tony Tysome, ‘Embrace Leitch or lose out to FE, sector warned’, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=209662&sectioncode=26, accessed May 14, 2009.
(9) see http://www.cihe-uk.com/fundingorganisations.php, accessed August 24, 2007.
(10) see http://www.cihe-uk.com/members.php, accessed August 24, 2007.
(11) see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution, accessed August 24, 2007.
(12) The UK’s Treasury website has put this document on-line. See http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/leitch_review/review_leitch_index.cfm, accessed August 24, 2007.
(13) This information provided by the Treasury’s press notice on the day that the Leitch Review was published. See http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/newsroom_and_speeches/press/2006/press_leitch.cfm, accessed August 24, 2007.
(14) David Hencke, ‘Brown’s £113,000 war chest for the leadership contest that never was’, May 31, 2007, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labourleadership/story/0,,2091743,00.html, accessed August 24, 2007.
(15) Leitch Review, p. 3.
(16) Leitch Review, p. 10-11.
(17) Leitch Review, p. 17
[18] See for example Donald Kennedy, ‘An epidemic of politics’, in Science, 31 January 2003, Vol. 299, No. 5607, p. 625. Article available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/299/5607/625, accessed August 24, 2007.
(19) M. Newman, ‘Charity status may be traded for legal gains’ in THES, http://www.thes.co.uk/current_edition/story.aspx?story_id=2037987, accessed August 25, 2007.

If Tony McNulty’s plans come to fruition, English and Welsh police will soon be armed with wooden cotton buds wrapped in paper.

Don’t be deceived by this apparently low-tech approach. Plastic tubular sticks and wrapping can’t be autoclaved. If and when you’re caught speeding, or if perhaps you fail to collect your dog’s faeces in the park, the officer who stops you and rubs the inside of your mouth to and fro will need to do so with a sterile bud.

Before doing so, s/he will probably read you a new version of the UK’s nearly defunct equivalent of the Miranda rights. In addition to the Tories’ Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (1994) text, ‘You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence’, the new version may well say something like ‘Whether you choose to say something or not, you will have to open your mouth when ordered to do so by the law enforcement officer, such that s/he might obtain your DNA sample’.

* * *

Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca was released in 1997, and is set in what the film describes as the ‘not-too-distant future’. Vincent Freeman, played by Ethan Hawke, wants to become an astronaut. But his parents have made the mistake of failing to consult a geneticist before Vincent is conceived. Within seconds of his birth, Vincent’s parents are read a list of his likely illnesses, and indeed the possible causes of his premature death are ‘neurological condition 60% probability; manic depression, 42% probability; attention deficit disorder 89% probability; heart disorder [the camera shows the nurse looking over at Vincent’s mother, who’s cuddling the new-born baby] 99% probability…life expectancy, 30.2 years’.

This effectively bars Vincent from becoming anything but a cleaner. As Vincent’s voiceover narration explains, ‘of course, it’s illegal to discriminate… genoism, it’s called, but no one takes the law seriously. If you refuse to disclose, they can always take a sample from a door handle, or a hand shake, even the saliva on your application form…’

Defying the logic of that not-too-distant future, Vincent goes on to become a super man. He beats his younger brother—the genetically ‘superior’ Anton—when they play chicken by swimming far out to sea. And from an early age, Vincent prepares to become an astronaut by poring over books about outer space. He is, however, barred from fulfilling that dream by his low ‘genetic quotient’.

A vicarious substitution—getting a job as a cleaner in the hyper-modernist offices of Gattaca, a corporation devoted to space exploration—only whets Vincent’s appetite for outer space. So he decides to go underground and buys the DNA identity of Jerome Morrow, a man with a ‘genetic quotient second to none’. Morrow, who is played by Jude Law, grew depressed and tried to commit suicide, but ended up instead on a wheelchair. He now needs the money that Vincent can earn by way of a job in Gattaca, and so is ready to sell his genetic identity to Vincent in order to sustain the luxurious lifestyle that his genetic ‘superiority’ earned until his attempted suicide.

To acquire Jerome’s identity, Vincent must go through what reality shows would describe as an extreme makeover. Jerome is a lot taller than Vincent, so Vincent must have his leg bones sawed and extended to attain Jerome’s height. Once he gets a job as an astronaut in Gattaca—which of course he does—its DNA surveillance technologies force him to take extreme precautions on a daily basis. Each morning, he must slick down his hair and shave his entire body to slough off any unwanted skin cells that might be detected at the workplace. Jerome must do the same, but for the opposite reason: he must produce the skin cells and hairs that Vincent will carefully sprinkle on his keyboard, in his desk drawer and indeed on the comb that he leaves behind at work. All of the Gattaca staff are also screened when they enter the workplace by way of a scanner that draws blood from the index finger, and on occasion urine samples are required. So Vincent and Jerome develop a daily routine for the production of the various samples in Jerome’s home laboratory.

At first, everything goes well, and indeed Vincent, known at Gattaca as Jerome Morrow, is chosen to go on a mission to Titan. But then someone murders the managing director in the Gattaca offices. The police investigating the crime scene find one of Vincent’s (real) eyelashes. The eyelash yields the ‘In-Valid’ DNA identity of Vincent. Although the police don’t know until the end of the film that the Gattaca ‘Jerome’ is really Vincent, they assume that the ‘In-Valid’ must be the murderer. As one of the detectives puts it, ‘We’ve found our man. It’s the only specimen in the entire place that can’t be accounted for.’

In fact, Vincent hasn’t killed the director, but the dogs of genoism and scientism have been let loose. The police start to close in on Vincent, armed with the apparently unassailable truth of a ‘proven’ DNA identification. The problem is no longer to question whether Vincent’s DNA has anything to do with the crime, but simply to find Vincent. The search itself is aided by the same technology: in one scene, the police swoop in on a bar where Vincent, aka Jerome, is having a drink with Irene (played by Uma Thurman), a Gattaca co-worker who suspects that ‘Jerome’ is an ‘In-Valid’. When the police come into the bar, they order everyone to stay inside, but the patrons run out in a panic. Doing so is futile because every person’s DNA ‘evidence’ is left behind. As the detective tells his staff, ‘check the handles. Check lenses… I want napkins, I want cigarette buts, I want the saliva off teacups…’

* * *

Gattaca’s future, imagined in our own past, is arguably New Labour’s present. In March, 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’. As Henry Porter puts it in the Observer, ‘…before we all shut up shop for the holidays, it is worth underlining one sentence that needs to be written in neon across every town centre: Britain is on the way to becoming a police state. […] Writing about the crisis of liberty in Britain, I have been careful not to use these words, but today I see no other conclusion to draw. Taken in the context of the ID card database, the national surveillance of vehicles and retention of information about every individual motorway journey, the huge number of new criminal offences, the half million intercepts of private communications every year, the proposed measures to take 53 pieces of information from everyone wishing to go abroad, which will include powers to prevent travel, this widening of the DNA database for minor misdemeanours confirms the pattern of attack on us all. It is time to pay attention to what the government under Labour has done to British society and what may be awaiting us just a short distance down the road.’(3)

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. I am 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 (4). 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 (5) 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 (6).

Returning to 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’.

Postscript: Given the seriousness of this matter, we should perhaps end this article with a little light relief: imagine a future in which a police officer orders you to stop, calmly pulls out a little paper envelope, carefully removes a cotton bud from it, and then suddenly points the bud at you and barks, ‘DROP THAT JAW!’

But anyone resisting that order may face a rather more conventional, if equally high-tech form of policing: apparently plans are afoot to arm officers with a new kind of Taser that shoots ‘wireless’ electric bullets by way of a shotgun. (Was this the kind of weapon that McNulty had in mind when he spoke of arming more officers with Tasers?).

If you’re wondering how this shotgun works, have a look at the Taser company’s own ‘XREP Teaser’ promotional video, in which a US military-style soldier—white of course—shoots first a ‘Black’ and then an ‘Asian’ man at http://www.taser.com/pages/VideoDetails.aspx?videoid=56. The tacit racism of this video, if not that future officer’s order, may make your jaw drop.

[Update on 29 October 2009: the offending video has long since vanished from the Taser website. See, however, the article titled Weapons of Mass Silencing.]

References

1) http://www.statewatch.org/news/2007/mar/uk-sweeping-new-police-powers.pdf, accessed 20 August 2007.
2) Modernising Police Powers: Review of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) 1984, p. 11.
3) Henry Porter, ‘Each DNA Swab Brings Us Closer to a Police State’ in Guardian Unlimited, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2141998,00.html, August 5 2007.
4) A Google search of the news on the morning of August 20, 2007 suggests little more than a few oldish entries, e.g. McNulty’s determination to arm more police officers with Tasers, and his defence of the massive policing bill for Gordon Brown’s coronation in Manchester. For the former news item, see Jane’s ‘Frontline Officer Squads to Trial Tasers’ at http://www.janes.com/news/lawenforcement/pr/pr070724_1_n.shtml, 24 July 2007; for the latter, see ‘MP demands enquiry into cost of Brown leadership conference’ in Guardian Unlimited, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labourleadership/story/0,,2140965,00.html, 3 August 2007.
5) http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/about-us/organisation/ministers/tony-mcnulty/, accessed 20 August, 2007.
6) http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/tony_mcnulty/harrow_east, accessed 20 August 2007. In fairness to McNulty, this website also suggests that he has a moderately liberal record when it comes to banning smoking and fox hunting, and a very liberal record when it comes to protecting gay rights.