Polly Toynbee - Government is good; you are paranoid

[IanFantom]

An amazing argument broke out on BBC 4's Today programme, when The Guardian's Polly Toynbee attacked The Observer's Henry Porter as being 'paranoid' in his warnings about increasing authoritarianism by the state.

Henry Porter had written on the dangers of an increasingly authoritarian state. "The evidence is on the statute book", he told John Humphries. "The executive has ignored parliament ... a lot of it doesn't go through parliament ... These things happen without even passing through parliament ... The effect has been programmatic".

Polly Toynbee: "I fear that some people ... become essentially paranoid about things that are quite small ... There is a kind of paranoia in which the state is seen as public enemy number one ... The obscure idea that ultimately a dictator might take over ... a matter of proportion ... the state is our friend ... our one instrument of civilisation"

HP: "we have now all the apparatus we need for a total dictatorship ..."

TP: "If we have a dictatorship we're in real trouble ..."

HP: "No other country in the world has this kind of apparatus for keeping people under surveillance ..."

TP: "... mishmash of a conspiracy theory that quite frankly I don't believe in ... I think it's a middle class notion of wanting to be a victim ..."

HP: "All of us are victims .."

TP: "Individualism is extremely dangerous ... government is good ... not the enemy".
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Note that HP had very carefully explained that he was not proposing a conspiracy. Why did Polly Toynbee put up a straw man argument? Nor did HP argue that we now have a dictatorship. He kept to facts.

The interview can be heard (for the rest of today) at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/

0837 Where does the balance fall between civil liberties and the security of the nation? We speak to the commentators Henry Porter and Polly Toynbee.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2224687,00.html
In a democracy accountability is everything. So, let's see some


As police and government press for yet more authoritarian measures over us all, a chief constable and a cabinet minister get off lightly

Henry Porter
Sunday December 9, 2007
The Observer

What is the connection between the penalty imposed on the chief constable for South Yorkshire, Meredydd Hughes, and the new upper limit proposed by the government for detention without trial? By chance, it is 42 days. Mr Hughes, an anti-speeding zealot who has said that driving is a privilege not a right, was taken off the road for exactly that period and fined £300. He was going 90mph in a 60mph limit.

There is another connection between Mr Hughes's lenient treatment and the enormous step in detaining and questioning suspects for six weeks without charge. It is accountability. The trouble is that as ministers and police press for more authoritarian measures and are prepared to lock up more and more people, insisting that everyone accepts a greater degree of responsibility for their actions, they show less and less inclination to do the same themselves

This should be no surprise to us. Sooner or later, those in power come to think that accountability is for the little people - people without a blue uniform or a large parliamentary majority. It is that which must make us demur when we are asked by the Home Secretary to accept her word on accountability.

I don't know if any mathematical relationship can be found between the acquisition of power and the decline of responsibility, but I would suggest that a clear graph could be drawn from the behaviour of the government over the past two weeks. Labour's deputy leader, Harriet Harman, and the Labour leader in Scotland, Wendy Alexander, have both managed to cling to their jobs despite being in contravention of Labour's own law on anonymous political donations.

In both cases self-interest and party interest came before the principle that they should have resigned when found to be in breach - whether in spirit or letter - of a law that was promoted with such self-righteous zeal back in 2001. But they rode out the storm and when it became clear that Wendy - with much batting of eyes and occasional tremors of the lower lip - had survived, Harriet was able to return to graze on the weird force field that surrounds our Prime Minister.

David Cameron suggested in these pages a few weeks ago that law makers should not be law breakers. I am not convinced that this is an absolute principle when it comes to ID cards, which was the context of his remark, but ministers do have a special responsibility to the general tone of an administration, particularly one which has been so keen to extend the state's powers.

It just looks hypocritical and shameless for one minister to be calling for six weeks' pre-charge detention and another to be announcing new 'titan' prisons to lock up 2,500 people each while their colleagues duck and dive on the question of unadmitted or lately admitted donations.

If ministers are to unpick the Magna Carta and Bill of Rights with such wholehearted enthusiasm, they should at least pay us the courtesy of obeying the law themselves.

Let's go back to Mr Hughes. A travelling salesman or delivery driver would almost certainly have lost their job as a result of a ban, which in any case would probably have been longer than six weeks. Mr Hughes has suffered inconvenience and embarrassment, but surely this is minor compared to the average citizen. Surely, he should have tendered his resignation, if only to prove that the outcome for the offence should be the same for the deliveryman as for the chief constable.

Again it's the lack of shame and real understanding that is interesting. Here is a man who, as chief traffic officer of the Association of Chief Police Officers, vigorously campaigned for the use of more hidden speed cameras. He had to resign from the post when he received the summons from North Wales magistrates, which is something I suppose, but what are those people who have been caught by Britain's network of speed cameras to think? What about the people who have lost their licences? Mr Hughes was punished, but was not by any stretch of the imagination made accountable.

The hard sell by Jacqui Smith on pre-charge detention includes a proposal that involves a chief constable and the director of public prosecutions reporting to the Home Secretary who then asks parliament for an increase on 28 days. There will be a 30-day window in which the house can vote. This means a suspect could be held for 42 days without the vote even being taken. How is this scrutiny? What evidence will MPs use to make up their minds in the vote? Surely not the evidence that police hope to present to a court of law. Of course not; MPs will be expected to take the Home Secretary's word for it.

For all I know, Jacqui Smith is an honourable women, but this kind of sleight of hand doesn't give you much faith about her actual motives. On her lips the words 'safeguard', 'consultation' and 'consensus' are somehow emptied of their commonly accepted meaning. As long as Labour dissidents are able to persuade themselves that there are new safeguards, that consultation of a meaningful nature has taken place and a consensus has formed, it doesn't matter what the truth is. But I don't think they're that stupid. They appreciate that the DPP, Sir Ken Macdonald, the man who will be integral to the new procedure, does not believe in extending 28 days.

Accountability is everything in a democracy. Many had their doubts about the new Home Secretary when she stood by Sir Ian Blair after the Metropolitan police were prosecuted for the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. A letter to the Times last week from a senior crown prosecution service lawyer, Stephen O'Doherty, makes clear why the failure on 22 July 2005 was so important. There was a four-and-half-hour gap between Mr Menezes's address being identified and the team of armed officers arriving.

'No satisfactory explanation was offered by the police for getting the arrest team to the address where Mr Menezes could be stopped,' he wrote.

In a nutshell, that was the case for corporate failure and Sir Ian needed to accept the ultimate responsibility for it - ie, resign. Jacqui Smith stood by him and he stayed. That decision argues for a fairly loose grasp of the fundamental principle of accountability.

I had even more doubts when the assistant commissioner of the Met in charge of terrorism, Andy Hayman, resigned following an investigation into £15,000 expenses claimed for foreign trips. The crucial question, which has gone unexplained, is what Mr Hayman was doing sending some 400 emails and text messages to a staff member at the Independent Police Complaints Commission during its investigations into the Menezes shooting.

There may be nothing in it but surely the Home Secretary should make a statement clarifying the situation, if only to prove the system is working, that accountability is a real part of the government's considerations. The public needs to know because it has a direct bearing on our ability to trust the systems and the people at the heart of Britain's security establishment.

It is these same people who will ask Parliament's permission to question a suspect for six weeks without break, a move which, quite apart from anything else, will bury Magna Carta and give gratuitous advantage to the terrorist recruiters. The scrutiny offered is obviously a fraud, yet MPs and the public will have to rely on the Home Secretary's word. To be candid, the record of accountability among ministers and police does not warrant that kind of trust.

henryporter@henry-porter.com

[TonyGosling]

Listen here when the BBC pull it.
ALL THE APPARATUS YOU NEED FOR A DICTATORSHIP
BONKERS!
1.7MB

http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=25923

[kbo234]

[John White]

[PaulStott]

But for people like Polly Toynbee government is good.

She actually believes people must be saved from themselves, and the more powerful the government is, broadly the better that is for people.

Although not always so blatant, such a position has been roughly part of the political consensus for 60+ years.

[Sherlock Holmes]

Operation Mockingbird never died and went away; it underwent metamorphosis into something far more sophisticated. Polly Toynbee is one example of this, proof if anyone ever need any. A 100% intelligence agency controlled shill.