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At last the great divide is
coming into focus
Henry Porter
London
Observer
Sunday December 16, 2007
Propaganda is theft because it attempts to deprive
people of the truth. Our sister paper, the Guardian, ran a debate
on liberty, rights and privacy and in it we saw two examples of
government propaganda. The first came from the Justice Minister
Jack Straw, who held that New Labour had 'deepened and extended'
civil liberties - yes, and I am Scary Spice. The second was from
columnist Polly Toynbee, New Labour's unblushing champion, who
accused people like me - actually, especially me - of being right-wingers
in liberal clothing and middle-class paranoids seeking victimhood.
Neither was successful because the authors do not
understand the difference between refuting an argument and rebutting
it. Straw is an old fashioned statist who believes if you go on
saying a lie people will eventually believe it. Toynbee is something
different. One senses panic rising from the realisation that it
is very hard to deny Labour's programme against liberty when most
of it is on the statute book.
So she scurries around wondering how she is going
to hold the line. Her first ploy was to muddy the waters by questioning
what is a reasonable freedom. For instance, she presents Labour's
campaign against free speech as merely anti-discrimination laws,
which is nothing like the whole truth. There is, she says, a clash
between the right to free speech and the right not to be abused.
The point is abuse is the corollary of free speech. I would prefer
everyone to be well-mannered and respectful yet I believe gays
have the right to be rude about the church and the church to be
rude about gays, without either running to the law.
(Article continues below)
Next step is for her to practise this free speech by referring
to what she calls my paranoia. That's fine by me but I'd just
point out that there is a difference between fear and paranoia,
as there is between sounding the alarm and being alarmist. And
again, it's not as if I, or any of the other contributors to the
debate, are making this up. It is irrefutably all there in Labour's
record.
The breathtaking dishonesty of her argument is to describe anyone
who opposes Labour on these grounds as a being a right-winger.
In our democracy liberals exist in all parties - thank God - and
it is eloquent of her desperation that she seeks to portray those
who stand for liberty, rights and privacy as being individualists
who are seeking the aura of victimhood, which of course decrypts
as privileged middle-class dilettantes. The allegation comes from
the hard-line sectarian communists of my student days, and it
is hardly surprising to find the same generation still at it in
New Labour, yet now adding notes of vanity, self-righteousness
and priggishness.
The striking thing is how few in the government and among its
supporters really grasp the substance of our complaints about
liberty over the last 10 years. With dismal familiarity, we watch
them move hastily from the matter in hand to rattle on about social
justice. The trick, you see, is to portray concerns about liberty
as a luxury for the privileged classes when what really matters
is poverty and inequality. She must know that there can be no
social justice without liberty, and vice versa. Besides, as the
gap between the rich and poor widens every day, New Labour and
its cheerleaders are at risk of causing nationwide symptoms of
motion sickness when they strike this particular pose.
We are all victims of Labour's authoritarian laws but often the
people whose interests New Labour claims to represent are especially
penalised - for instance, the defendants who are pressurised in
police stations to plead guilty by video link to crimes they have
not committed because there is no adequate legal representation
to hand. Why doesn't Toynbee write about the measures smuggled
into the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act which will combine
with the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act to make it legal
for bailiffs to enter someone's home and seize property on a civil
order? Jack Straw's Department of Justice is currently formulating
the rules that will govern the force that may be offered to single
mothers, old ladies, teenagers and young children who happen to
be at home when the bailiffs come. Will she be reminding us that
Labour has buried 400 years of protection against this outrage?
Full
article here.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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