David Cameron: aiming high in the indolent politician stakes

On being told of US President Calvin Coolidge’s death, Dorothy Parker famously said, “how do they know?”

Coolidge was known as “Silent Cal.” A young woman who sat next to him at dinner one evening is said to have told him that she’d taken a bet that she would get more than two words out of him. “You lose,” he replied, and never addressed another word to her.

Silent Cal
Cameron sadly seems as little inclined to rise to challenges
Even more sadly, he can't emulate him in keeping quiet about it

To be fair, Coolidge was probably not quite as awful as his successor, Herbert Hoover, who presided brainlessly over the great crash of 1929. He concentrated on balancing the budget, and left the economy in free fall. It could only be rescued once he’d been voted out of office and replaced by Franklyn Roosevelt.

Interestingly, David Cameron is nothing like Coolidge in that he keeps on talking. But like him, in all other ways, he seems hopelessly unable to make a good judgement. And, like Hoover, he’s so fixated on balancing the budget, that he can’t see what he’s destroying on the way to doing it.

He behaves like a man who doesn’t want to have to read his briefing documents.

On coming to office, he oversaw the bold decision to slash spending on flood defences by £125m a year, from Labour’s spendthrift level of £665m. No doubt he felt this bolstered the macho image he was cultivating, of a Prime Minister with the guts to take the tough decisions to balance the books.

Then there was serious flooding in 2012. And – lo and behold – he found £120m to plough back in, all but restoring the cut, to relaunch delayed projects.

You could be forgiven for wondering whether he hadn't thought through the consequences of his actions.

This is just one of a series of half-baked decisions over which he’s presided. He dropped Labour’s plans for a new generation of planes to fly from aircraft carriers, preferring a different model. But there were problems with that model. So he had to revert to the Labour approach.

That bright fellow, Michael Gove, then Cameron’s Education Secretary came up with a smart idea. The GCSE, a state exam taken by most school pupils at 16, would be replaced by something far better. Except that it turns out it wasn’t – the boards that oversee exam qualifications, most educational experts and even the Tories on the parliamentary select committee on Education, pointed out all sorts of flaws in the plan, and five months later it was dropped.

David Cameron
And when you think he's half asleep, he's really half awake

It seems Cameron is starting his second term exactly how he started his first: with wild, ill-thought through proposals. And, curiously, Gove’s involved again, on the latest and most egregious of them. He’s now Justice Minister and therefore closely bound up in the Cameron wheeze to repeal the Human Rights Act.

Cameron was at it again in the parliament this afternoon: “Be in no doubt: we will be introducing legislation and legislating on this issue because I want these decisions made by British judges in British courts, not in Strasbourg.”

It seems that once more he hasn’t completely mastered his brief. Britain is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights. As a result, British citizens can bring human rights cases to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Incidentally, this is not an institution of the European Union, but of the Council of Europe, a much bigger but looser grouping of countries. Britain’s leaving the EU would not take it out of the Council.

The idea of the Human Rights Act was to incorporate the legislation into British law, so that citizens wouldn’t have to appeal to Strasbourg, but could instead have their cases heard in Britain. In other words, to have “decisions made by British judges in British courts.”

It’s hard not to conclude that Cameron really hasn’t done his homework. Again.

Fortunately, though, he seems to have woken up to his mistakes slightly more quickly this time than he has on previous blunders. The Queen’s Speech today, where the government announced its legislative programme, contained no reference to repealing the Human Rights Act, just a vague reference to bringing in “proposals for a British Bill of Rights.”

It’s just as well. Even Conservative MP Dominic Grieve told Sky News that “I am wholly unpersuaded that the benefit outweighs the really substantial costs that will come with this.”

As for Labour, the former Justice Minister Lord Falconer was firm: “It increasingly looks like the Tories are making it up as they go along. What is clear is that if they suggest completely scrapping people’s human rights protections, Labour will oppose them all the way.”

Making it up as he goes along. Sounds like Cameron. Sounds like any lazy man.

He may not be as silent as Coolidge, but Cameron’s seems to be rivalling his inertia. As well as Hoover’s ineptitude.

If the people don't, who'll defend rights against government abuse?

A pincer movement is a much more effective form of attack than a simple frontal assault.

That no doubt is the reason we’re facing a two-pronged movement against civil rights in Britain at the moment.

One prong is being run by the government and takes the form of legal moves to introduce secret trials, held in private and with the defence denied access to the prosecution evidence.

The other prong is still more insidious in that it is based on whipping up a popular movement. Spearheaded by the right wing of the Conservative Party and its sniping opponents even further to the right in UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party), it takes the form of a campaign against the Human Rights Act. A measure of its relative success is that it has managed to make ‘human rights’ sound like a bad thing – an extraordinary piece of doublespeak, fully worthy of Orwell’s 1984.

The pressure for closed trials is ostensibly based on the need to keep certain types of evidence hidden from certain types of defendant, mainly evidence obtained by the intelligence services, used against presumed terrorists. Just how serious the issue is was made clear by the former Labour Cabinet Minister Jack Straw. In a debate on the bill on 4 March, he told the House of Commons that in certain circumstances certain types of information have to remain concealed, in order to protect secret sources. If secrecy could not be guaranteed, the evidence could not be used and a terrorist might walk free and offend again. Straw went on:

‘If we had explained how we had ended up in such a situation by saying that information had to be provided in its entirety in open court in all circumstances, people would have said, “Thanks very much, but my relative, wife or child has just died.” That is the dilemma and it is not abstract—it is absolutely real.’

That immediately reminds me of Benjamin Franklin: ‘those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.’ Britain at its best decided to put certain freedoms above protecting life – if not, it would not have fought on against Nazi Germany in June 1940, at a time when many even in government favoured surrender, in a war that in the end cost nearly half a million British lives.

Jack Straw
Once a radical, now keen on secret trials

That however isn’t the most shameful aspect of Straw’s statement. The truth, as Henry Porter pointed out in the Observer this weekend, is that the effect of revealing evidence in open court in terrorist cases has not been to free terrorists, but to embarrass the government and force it to pay damages for having behaved illegally. No wonder government wants to conceal this kind of information. 

Porter reminds us that Straw told parliament in 2005 that Britain had not been involved in rendition and torture of terror suspects; in 2009, his successor David Miliband had to admit that the statement was untrue and apologise for it. 

That’s what secret courts are about: not so much to protect us from terrorists but to protect government from embarrassing disclosures of its own bungling or criminal acts.

Which brings me to second prong of the attack, against the Human Rights Act. The popular movement against it points to the criminals who hide behind its provisions, and many do – but then criminals have always been good at abusing rights. That doesn’t mean we should do without them.

Article 6 of the Act guarantees that ‘everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law’ (my emphasis). Later, it specifies that a person accused of a crime is entitled ‘to be informed promptly, in a language which he understands and in detail, of the nature and cause of the accusation against him’ and equally ‘to examine or have examined witnesses against him’

The US constitution is remarkable for its conciseness, its ability to express fundamental rights much more succinctly than most such legislation. Coincidentally, as it is Article 6 of the Human Rights Act, it is the Sixth Amendment of the US Constitution that deals with the right to a fair a trial:

‘In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

The fact that the same rights are guaranteed on both sides of the Atlantic does rather suggest that they’re regarded as fundamental generally in democratic societies.

So why do so many citizens in Britain oppose the Human Rights Act? Especially when the government is busily trying to bring in legislation that undermines one of its most significant articles. Have some of my compatriots suddenly decided that they don’t need protection from government misdeeds and that the two-pronged attack therefore deserves to succeed?

Odd. They don’t usually show such touching confidence in the good faith of their rulers.