The power of fear for political control

A STRANGE thing is happening in Britain: the Labour Party, the party that abolished hanging, legalised homosexuality, ended theatre censorship, allowed abortion and liberalised divorce, is becoming a party obsessed with control, whose buzzword is ‘war’, war on terror, war on crime, war on drugs.

Tony Blair’s administration has imprisoned more Britons than any other in history – Labour or Conservative – it has introduced a form of house arrest for terrorist suspects (and that only as a climb-down after being told it could not merely detain them indefinitely without charge), it has been equivocal regarding evidence obtained through torture in interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is planning to introduce ID cards, again in order to assist its various ‘wars’, it has introduced a form of curfew on those accused of anti-social behaviour.

Indeed, last week the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioners, Alvaro Gil Robles (who had a few things to say about our own abuses here in Cyprus), was scathing about the British government, which, he said, seemed to treat human rights as no more than a “formal commitment, and, at worse as a cumbersome obstruction”.

What an irony to see the Conservative Party transformed into defenders of civil liberties, opposing ID cards and standing up for the absolute right of jury trial against a succession of Labour home secretaries who behave as if the end always justified the means.

Why does this matter to us? Because there are lessons to be learned for everyone, including us in Cyprus. Of course, our little island will never be on the front line of the ‘war on terror’ in the way that Britain is, our gun crime is infantile compared to the problems faced in the UK, alcohol fuelled violence is barely an issue in our very different social environment.

Yet the authoritarian drift of the current Labour government is a temptation especially pernicious in our modern, media-driven societies. New Labour is following an agenda defined by the tabloids, one that plays on, and feeds off, fear and prejudice. We do not have the equivalent of a tabloid press, but we do have the tyranny of television, the obsessive desire of politicians of every hue to get their opinions transmitted on the box. Instead of the media acting as a curb on politicians, it is serving as their platform for populism, demanding a lowest common denominator of opinion that politicians are only too eager to provide.

The problems in this country are different, but the dangers are the same – using fear (of terror, crime, immigrants, Turks, whatever it be) to allow ever greater political control through a silencing of criticism and a gradual fusion of political and executive power. We must not allow ourselves, bowed by exaggerated fears, to approve the curtailment of the very core liberties that define a democratic society.