Why did Labour get it so badly wrong on Civil Liberties?

By Darrell Goodliffe

The candor of Ed Balls at the weekend, admitting what many of us have known for a long time, that Labour in government got it wrong on civil liberties, was no less welcome than it was surprising. Hopefully, it will open a wider debate within the party about where and why we got it wrong. This is my humble contribution to that debate.

First, I want to briefly dispel a myth. Namely the one that civil liberties are an essentially ‘liberal’ concern with nothing to do with socialism or with any other form of progressive politics. Socialism is nothing without democracy and it is the failure of the socialist and social democratic left to capture the commanding heights of democracy within its demands and politics that have led to its decline. What is the primary socialist critique of capitalism if not the sheer anti-democracy of the economic inequality that is structurally imposed on us all? When people say it is ‘liberal’ to be concerned about civil liberties within Labour they usually mean it as a term of abuse; trying to imply an affiliation to liberal economics; something that artificially constrains the debate.

With that out the way, let’s try and address the question. I think, in the first instance, Labour got it so badly wrong on civil liberties because of the very credo that New Labour espoused. New Labour preached liberal economics but because of its germination site – within a centre-left party – it felt that it had to replace economic activism by the state with something else. This ‘something else’ became an ethical obligation which, under the pressure of the start of the War on Terror, gave direct rise to liberal interventionism abroad (a perversion of ‘Old Labour’ socialist internationalism) and a paternalistic state at home. ID cards, CCTV, DNA Databases etc., were all seen (in very moralistic terms) as ‘necessary evils’ in the service of the ‘greater good’ of protecting communities and the people from crime and terrorists.

It didn’t matter that us all having ID cards would not have made a bit of difference to stopping the infamous 7/7 bombing. It didn’t matter that draconian anti-terror legislation eats away like a cancer at the very democracy its supposed to protect, because Labour in government was blinded from any kind of sound reasoning by its leaders overweening sense of moral self-assurance. This also meant that we couldn’t tell people the truth; the only effective defence against terrorism is good intelligence and no matter how good that is the odds are, sadly, that there is still the very real chance that one attempt will slip through the net. On crime we abdicated responsibility for dealing with the causes by being tough on enforcement. When it comes to issues like drugs this has left us with a nonsensical position that left the field of rational discourse a long time ago. Playing political games with classifications and donning a very hairy shirt may play well in the polls but that isn’t the point; it ruins peoples lives and fails to address, long-term, issues that need addressing.

The way forward is to shed the scales that this sense of a moral obligation placed on our eyes and start entering again a discourse again where democracy is at the center of our considerations and is not some peripheral concern that we can do without. If we do that then Labour will quickly find its way again on civil liberties (and a fair few other issues) and, contrary to what we are told, we will regain the trust of the electorate again much quicker.