Brown’s bona fides
AC Grayling writes in The Guardian:
The real test of Brown’s bona fides as a champion of liberty remains ID cards. The chief of many fallacies underlying arguments in favour of biometric cards seems to have been bought by Brown: that if we have a technology, we must use it. He must be urged to see that the potential misuses of ID technology and the creation “identity recognition” – which will summon the most creative energies of a huge new criminal industry – jointly entail that it is the worst kind of folly to create an instrument that profoundly undermines civil liberties and invites nightmares of misuse, misapplication and mistake in future. If Brown would really convince us of his civil liberty credentials, he should start by abandoning the ID card scheme.
October 29th, 2007 at 17:22
[...] sted in Uncategorized at 11:58 am by
Don wrote an interesting post today on Brown’s bona fidesHere’s a quick excerpt The real test [...]
October 30th, 2007 at 09:58
The Professor is too kind.
He is “inclined to hope” that Mr Brown is not another Blair, he is prepared to try to take Mr Brown’s speech “at face value”, the Professor considers that Mr Brown is “obviously sincere” and that “it is evident that he means what he says”, unlike Mr Blair, who only paid “lip service” to liberty.
Mr Brown has been in power for 10 years. He chose to exercise that power over the NHS, vetoing Tony Blair. He chose to exercise that power over education, vetoing Tony Blair. He chose not to exercise that power over ID cards and habeas corpus.
It follows that he has no objection to ID cards and the suspension of habeas corpus. Actions speak louder than words. Or, as the Professor’s friend (and mine) Aristotle put it, the conclusion of a practical syllogism is an action. It is too late to give him the benefit of the doubt. There is no doubt left.
We have just had several weeks of open discussion about Mr Brown’s disinclination to tell the truth. First about his reasons for calling off Ed Balls’s election. Then about the reasons for Mr Darling announcing amendments to inheritance tax and capital gains tax in the pre-budget report. And we have had several months of open discussion about his decision to break the manifesto promise of a referendum on the EU Constitution, which he alone claims is not a Constitution.
Quite how Mr Brown can entertain the thoughts about liberty expressed in his speech while simultaneously endorsing “civil liberty-reducing security legislation” is a matter of psychiatric interest. As the Professor’s friend (and mine) Professor Sir Michael Dummett put it, perhaps it is the case that words can only have meaning if the abiding intention is to speak the truth. Without that intention, they have no meaning.
Mr Brown has spent 10 years hacking vandalistically at the Constitution we already have. He is not the man to entrust with writing a new Constitution. He has also demonstrated that he can’t recognise a Constitution when he sees one.
He is a hopeless case and the Professor’s charitable attempts to treat his On Liberty speech as a sincere statement of belief are gentle but misplaced. That speech is Mr Brown’s own sunset clause. Let him now wither away, his credibility shot, utterly isolated as he is from the voters, his party, Parliament, the civil service, the judiciary, the armed forces, the press and the unions.
These are not charitable thoughts. But this is not the time for charity. Mr Brown has to represent the UK in negotiations with the EU and the US, NATO and the UN, India, China and the G8. Not to mention a resurgent Russia. We cannot be successfully represented by him. It is imperative that he go as soon as possible.