The Conservative immigration spokesman, Damian Green, is not a figure ordinarily likely to elicit much sympathy from me – although Boris Johnson’s call for an amnesty for illegal immigrants was the most sensible suggestion on immigration for many years. But the arrest of Damian Green MP is a constitutional outrage that may finally motivate our supine parliament to stand up to this domineering executive.
When Tony Blair halted the process of law in the BAE corruption case over arms exports to Saudi Arabia, I commented that we had abandoned the principle that no man, however high, is above the law – a principle which we had chopped off Charles I’s head to entrench.
Charles I famously failed to arrest opposition MPs when he arrived at the House of Commons with his soldiers to be defied by the Speaker and find that, as he observed, “The birds have flown”. That attempt was critical in precipitating the country into civil war.
The good citizenry of London and Cambridge will not be grabbing their pikes and muskets today; but they should. The arrest of Damian Green for doing his job of opposing the executive is a step too far in rolling back centuries of democratic achievement. The pretext is the excessive desire of this government to keep all public information secret, and prevent the taxpayer from finding out what has been done in their name and at their expense. This is the most secretive, as well as the most authoritarian, government of the modern era.
I can comment with more authority than most in saying that civil servants now have a duty to leak: the official narrative is now so often far from the truth across the whole field of government, that if civil servants do not leak there can be no informed democratic debate. To arrest an opposition MP for finding out what is really happening is a grim, grim move.
I was told that the UK was on the brink in 1992; the economic situation was far, far worse than the people were led to believe. From then on it is said the government embarked on activities on a massive scale that were not only illegal but some of the consequences barbaric.
If this true it would account for their jumpiness about MPs divulging information, which might open little cracks into exactly what's going.
We are subjected to constant surveilance, passports and driving licences do more than merely identify us, our DNA is permanantly recorded if we come to the attention of the Police (by force if necessary), email and internet activity is monitored and number plates are routinely recorded. Our Police forces are gradually converting into elitist, secretive organisations with, amongst other things, the introduction of powerless Community Officers moving empowered and trained officers further away from the community.
Politicians are persistantly meddling in events and environments they know nothing about more often than not to promote themself as activly involved in the community. Anti terrorist legislation was abused by authorities almost before the ink was dry on the paper it was penned on. Now the arrest of an opposition MP by the 'elite' anti terrorist squad, presumably in an attempt to pass the event off as a national security issue, for reasons that would have your local copper (if there were any left) telling you "this is a civil matter mate, we only deal with criminal offences".
All of the foregoing is argued and reasoned away as justifiable to prevent terrorism, paedophiles and to clear up historic crimes as well as defeating organised crime; but crime figures are barely affected other than increasing and the reason given for this? more crimes are being revealed by advanced technology yet no one in government anticipated this would have an impact on our prisons or our lamentably creaking judicial system.
I find this event very worrying, not for the event alone but for the contributing conditions that allowed it to take place. I believe the Police and Government must be complicit in events as the Police had no right being involved; any copper would have recognised the situation as political and civil therefore I believe they must have been 'persuaded' to get involved.
I fear we are waking up too late.