Control Orders abolition is timely boost for Nick Clegg

After the kerfuffle - or in the Prime Minister's more colourful lexicon, the impending "f**king car crash" - a couple of months ago concerning control orders, it appears that they are going to be abolished after all.

I did not buy the Sunday Times today, chiefly because I overslept as a result of Apple's iPhone glitch, nor do I subscribe to the online version (though watch this space).  So this news comes to me courtesy of David Blackburn at the Spectator's Coffee House blog.  Astride an earnest photograph of the Liberal leader, Nick Clegg, is the headline: 'A pyrrhic victory for the Lib Dems?'

In November 2010, here and here, I made the case for abolishing control orders.  In spite of the sincere wishes of the security services, they are an infringement of our fundamental civil liberties and an affront to the ancient British constitution.

There is a strong argument for their retention and one that I acknowledge wholly.  One Conservative backbencher put it to me in no uncertain terms, that your everyday British citizen in the provinces could not spare a thought for elite metropolitan musings about habeas corpus and "ancient liberties".  People want to know that they are safe and if the security services tell us that control orders make this country safer - especially at a time when the Prime Minister informs that "the terrorist threat is as serious as it has ever been" - then these instruments are a price worth paying.  Tell them that they only affect nine people and the case will be, for most people, closed.

Nonetheless, I maintain my belief that an excessive erosion of our civil liberties is not the correct antidote to fighting terrorism.  It is, as I wrote in November, a 'head versus heart' sort of call.  My heart certainly desires the ending of control orders and on balance, my head does too.

Yet the most immediate point is that this is a timely boost for Nick Clegg, who ended 2010 at rock bottom personally and his party sinking ever lower, following the fallout over tuition fees and the disreputable sting of coalition ministers by Daily Telegraph journalists.  Whilst control orders are also opposed by a number of senior Tories, they would probably have been retained by a majority Conservative Government.  A rearguard attack from the likes of David Davis would have caused no damage to the Government in that scenario.  He might perceive himself as a standard bearer for popular Tory disaffection but this is a policy on which he might find little favour in his party.

As voters go to the polls in the Oldham East & Saddleworth by-election, the scrapping of control orders is a valuable feather in the cap of the Deputy Prime Minister and further evidence that his Liberals are making a significant impact in Government.  Prior to learning about the control orders situation, I made the prediction that the Liberals would gain the seat that they came within one hundred votes of winning in May.  This latest policy victory only strengthens that prediction.

Back over at Coffee House, the caveat is inserted that this a 'pyrrhic victory' for Nick Clegg, as it contrasts painfully with the perceived 'loss' over tuition fees for full-time undergraduate UK students (to provide the full terminology).

I'm not so sure.  The article rightly remarks that this "popular perception" of the HE issue is "erroneous".  Nonetheless, to juxtapose it with control orders suggests that they are connected - for it to be 'Pyrrhic', after all, they would have to be, and the 'loss' of tuition fees would have to have been the cost of the 'win' of control orders.

Yet that is a semantically driven chicken-and-egg quibble, which I shan't dwell on.  The main point is that voters are not going to put two-and-two together unless  journalists wishing to construct a political narrative do it for them on a persistent basis.

The damage has been done on tuition fees and the upcoming White Paper is not going to make matters any better or worse.  The Liberal contribution to more general HE reforms is significant - a majority Conservative Government would have, for instance, accepted Lord Browne's recommendation to remove the fee cap entirely.  Regrettably, salient points such as that no longer have any chance of piercing the violent fog of student contention.

On control orders, however, Nick Clegg can point to a genuine victory and one that is very straightforward to communicate.  A Conservative Government equals the retention of control orders.  A Coalition Government equals the removal of control orders.

The Government's ability to sell its message has been pretty hit and miss since its formation last summer.  Nevertheless, this is no hard sell.

As long as the media is willing to buy it, that is.


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UPDATE: Michael White has posted this article too, which takes the same line as David Blackburn at the Speccie, i.e. that Clegg should not be claiming this as too much of a 'victory'.


His verdict is somewhat different, however, in that Clegg's reticence should stem from the horrible possibility that this all turns out badly in the form of another homegrown terrorist atrocity that could have been prevented by a control order.


I sympathise with all of that, as I write above, yet still agree with Shami Chakrabati's statement: "punishment without charge or trial is the hallmark of despots".  And Michael White concedes, "it's hard to disagree with her."

On the Coalition's first Christmas, some advice from Sir Winston Churchill

It is Christmas, so I am home with the family in sylvan, snowy Sussex.  For the next few days, I will be living out a life of repetitive, traditional bliss.  Ah! a chocolate.  Another glass of Chasse-Spleen 1983?  It would be a crime not to.  Darling, do have some more turkey, it will only go to the dog.  If you insist.

Another Christmas tradition is to peruse my parents' bookshelves for something to lose myself in, beside the drawing room fireplace, in front of the tree.  This year, I am re-reading Churchill's history of the Second World War: a collection of six volumes so imperious in composition that it garnered him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.  The opening paragraphs of Chapter II in the first volume, The Gathering Storm (1948), deserve to be quoted at length.  To contextualise, Churchill was at the time a Liberal MP and Secretary of State for the Dominions and Colonies.

The party stresses which the Irish Settlement had created inside Mr. Lloyd George's Coalition were growing with the approach of an inevitable General Election.  The issue arose whether we should go to the country as a Coalition Government or break up beforehand.  It seemed more in accordance with the public interest and the decencies of British politics that parties and Ministers who had come through so much together and bore a mass of joint responsibilities should present themselves unitedly to the nation.  In order to make this easy for the Conservatives, who were by far the larger and stronger party, the Prime Minister and I had written earlier in the year offering to resign our offices, and give our support from a private station to a new Government to be formed by Mr. Austen Chamberlain.  The Conservative leaders, having considered this letter replied firmly that they would not accept that sacrifice from us and that we must all stand or fall together.  This chivalrous attitude was not endorsed by their followers in the party, which now felt itself strong enough to resume undivided power in the State.

By an overwhelming vote the Conservative Party determined to break with Lloyd George and end the National Coalition Government.  The Prime Minister resigned that same afternoon.  In the morning we had been friends and colleagues of all these people.  By nightfall they were our party foes, intent on driving us from public life.

The passage follows a chapter on the disastrous fallout of the Treaties of Versailles, Trianon and St-Germain, the fallacy of German (or in Chuchillian  parlance, "Prussian") reparations and the failure to stop rearmament.  Reading it now, it wrenches you abruptly from a dry history lesson to the immediacy of Liberal-Conservative coalition politics.  The relevance of Churchill's prose is breathtaking.

There are, of course, dissimilarities - not least that our present Prime Minister is not a womanising Welshman, nor a Liberal or, for that matter, a Whig (careful now, Mr Lawson).  Perhaps, I trivialise.  Yet in a week that David Cameron has given his clearest endorsement yet of some kind of electoral pact in 2015, and the Government campaign in Oldham East & Saddleworth leans weightily in the direction of a Liberal Democrat gain, it is worth highlighting for its mere message that 'we have been here before'.  Not just in the mundane 'Liberals always split' narrative that we are used to reading, but from a very personal, involved viewpoint about what it is like to operate at the heart of a political coalition.

At its most fundamental, Government at the top succeeds and falls on personalities.  For illustration, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were co-authors of New Labour  in Opposition and co-practitioners of New Labour in Government, yet as a result of their irreconcilable personal mindsets the TB-GB's paralysed their administrations (even after Blair departed, stage right).

One month ago, Sir John Major urged the sort of accommodation that Churchill  suggests ought to have taken place in 1922.  It is encouraging that the present incumbent isn't deaf to such advice from two distinguished former Prime Ministers.

It is traditional at this time of year to have to spend time with friends and family you rarely see, for better or for worse.  Sometimes this is a joyous occasion,  yet for others it is one fraught with frayed tempers and stressful endurance.

The coalition family is spending its first Christmas together, and this week internal bickering behind family members' backs threatened to provoke terminal breakdown.  Instead, that family is sticking together.  They don't all like each other and they certainly don't always agree.  Yet they have chosen this course willingly and for honourable, upright reasons, they shall see it through.  If that culminates in an agreement in 2015, however formal or informal, it will not be for lack of contemplation.

It is very evident that this Prime Minister possesses the "chivalrous attitudes" that others in the Westminster playground appear to lack.  Dr Cable might be shorn of a couple of baubles this Christmas, but it is the Barclay brothers who will be receiving a lump of coal.

The Conservative Party can be the Natural Party of Coalition Government

Conservatives claim that theirs is the ‘natural party of government’.  On top of that, I argue that the party should also be considered the ‘natural party of coalition’, based on its diverse philosophical heritage, which has engendered an instinct that is pragmatic and non-ideological.

Let's look at Edmund Burke - was he a Conservative?  Lord Acton, the Liberal historian, thought him one of the three greatest liberals, alongside Gladstone and Macaulay.  In Das Kapital, Karl Marx branded him “an out-and-out vulgar bourgeois” and criticised his hypocrisy in supporting the American revolutionaries but attacking the French Revolution.  Sir Winston Churchill summed up Burke’s polysemy when he wrote, “On the one hand he is revealed as a foremost apostle of Liberty, on the other as the redoubtable champion of Authority.”

Strictly speaking, our contemporary panegyrics to Edmund Burke are anachronisms.  He was neither a Conservative (such a party did not exist), nor a Tory.  Burke was a Whig and, by extension of his fervent advocacy for Roman Catholic emancipation and free trade, indubitably no friend of the Tories, generally ardent Anglicans and protectionists.

Yet Burke should be considered a founding father of modern Conservatism precisely because of his apparent contradictions.  To those who believe that politics should be about belief systems strictly adhered to, such as Karl Marx, Burke was indeed a hypocrite.  However, Burke did have beliefs, as innate to him as any Conservative today, centred on freedom, responsibility and community.  That he felt able to apply these instincts to the American Revolution but not the French is a mark of his pragmatic appreciation of context.  The revolutionaries in France might well have set to their task with liberté, égalité et fraternité in mind but the cause descended into murder, mayhem and misery, amidst which disappeared those virtues evident in the Thirteen Colonies a decade before.

In the North American revolutionaries, Edmund Burke saw a rejection of tyranny; contrariwise, in the Jacobins of the 1790s, terrorizing ideologues.  It is via that anti-dogmatic streak in Burke that we can discover our most authentic link to his tenebrous thinking.

The policies of political parties ebb and flow yet certain instincts remain the same.  It is possible to remain true to Conservative instincts – such as freedom, individual responsibility and community – yet still be able to approach policymaking pragmatically, flexibly and openly, in the national interest.  It was Burke again, who said, “All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.”

Genuine conservatives are not ideologues.  Conservatives do not possess any scopic Weltanschauung, instructing them how to re-order the world as presented to them.  Lord Hailsham, wrote in The Conservative Case (1959): “Conservatism is not so much a philosophy as an attitude, a constant force, performing a timeless function in the development of a free society, and corresponding to a deep and permanent requirement of human nature itself.”

Political parties steeped in ideological dogma are congenitally ill suited to the purlieus of coalition politics.  The “compromise and barter” that Burke spoke of does not come naturally to them.

“Compromise” (or “consensus”) has been a word besmeared in right-wing politics since the 1970s.  Margaret Thatcher said, “To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies.”  Perhaps such a stance was necessary for her time.  Perhaps it was even a pragmatic reaction to the discord of her time.  To contemporaries of the late 1970s, the ‘Butskellite’ consensus of the post-war period did appear to have run its course.  Nonetheless, some of the inimical, unintended consequences of the 1980s may have been averted – or at least mitigated – by a modicum of consensus building.

Come what may, Burke’s “compromise and barter” is palpably valuable here and now.  In order to provide this country with the strong government needed to impel and sustain economic recovery and deficit reduction, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats boldly came coalesced into a remarkable accommodation, in the national interest.  Neither party could get everything that it wanted.  The Coalition Agreement, excogitated with astonishing alacrity, is the result of “compromise and barter.”

The Conservative Party's standing as the ‘natural party of coalition’ is not only based on the recognition that politics is “founded on compromise and barter.”  It is also based on the party's diverse political heritage.  This summer gone, ConservativeHome, a right-wing political website, asked new Conservative MPs to answer a short questionnaire, including naming their political heroes.  Their responses roamed freely through eras and philosophies: from Edmund Burke to William Wilberforce to Benjamin Disraeli; from Winston Churchill to Rab Butler; from Iain Macleod to Margaret Thatcher.

One answer, above all, was worthy of more detailed scrutiny.  Steve Baker, MP for Wycombe, named Richard Cobden as his political hero, because he “gave up his business prospects to further the philosophy of freedom in the general interest.  He was principled, pragmatic and yet thoughtful.”  Those who know their 19^th century history will recall Cobden as the radical Member of Parliament for Stockport, to whom Sir Robert Peel, “without scruple...attribute[d] the success” of the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, beyond any other individual, including himself.  Richard Cobden was most certainly no Tory or Conservative.  He was a tireless advocate of free trade, a policy with which few Conservatives now would disagree.  Then, however, the issue of free trade split a nascent Conservative Party between old protectionist Tories, the country bumpkin party of yesteryear, and the liberal conservative Peelites.  The protectionist majority were the direct antecedent of today’s Conservative Party – an unbroken corporate lineage runs from Lord George Bentinck, through Benjamin Disraeli, all the way to David Cameron.  The rump of more liberal Peelite Tories, which included William Gladstone, eventually merged with Radical and Independent Irish MPs to form the Liberal Party.  To which group do we owe the greatest philosophical debt?  Entire theses have been devoted to that question, but I hope that you will appreciate my basic point.  We are not merely a product of the Conservative Party but also a product of Whig, Radical and Liberal thought.

Conservatives are not only sharing power and office with the Liberal Democrats; they also share origins.  The two parties have gone their various ways in the past 150 years but I believe that they still share those core instincts of freedom, responsibility and community.  The example of Richard Cobden and free trade demonstrates how particular policies can seem anathema to a political party in one era and fundamental in another – yet instincts remain the same.  Compromising and building consensus does not mean a dereliction of principles – it means applying those principles to the needs of your time.

A broad philosophical heritage and the un-ideological, pragmatic, conservative instincts of freedom, responsibility and community can cross partisan divides.  The time will come again when the Conservative Party can govern on its own.  Yet if that is not the case in May 2015, and once more, we are faced with necessary “compromise and barter”, then again the party must not be troubled – for the Conservative Party is the natural party of coalition.

The Daily Telegraph just refuses to understand its irresponsibility

The Daily Telegraph's latest invidious political intervention is both embarrassing for the Liberal Democrat ministers involved (but not shocking) and another sad indictment on what is left of what is erroneously referred to still as our 'quality' press.

Their only motive can be to injure (and so kill off) the Coalition. Why else reveal in an underhand fashion what we all know to be so? Ministers do, have done, and always will disagree privately. It shows poor judgement to mouth off to strangers about internal Government politics but the predictably shrill reaction has princpially addressed Government 'splits', not the behaviour of Messrs Davey, Moore, Webb and Cable.

The search for internal splits in this Liberal-Conservative coalition is laughable. For who can remember a Government more united in opinion, direction and purpose than this? The Labour Governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown fail utterly on that count, as did John Major's before them and Margaret Thatcher's. It seems counter-intuitive, but coalitions can forge stronger bonds than single parties, by virtue of shared pains in reaching an accord.

What this little (soon to be as irrelevant as One Direction) episode brings to my mind, however, is less about Government unity (it remains very strong) than the rabid, vicious and insatiable appetite for criticism of politicians by the media and the public, regardless of truths and good intentions. It is criticism for criticism's sake; destructive and irresponsible.

It calls to mind the words of Sir Robert Peel, writing to the free trade campaigner Richard Cobden, shortly after the repeal of the Corn Laws in June 1846:

Such a position as mine entails the severest sacrifices. The strain on the mental power is far too severe... But the world - the great and small vulgar - is not of this opinion. I am sorry to say they do not and cannot comprehend the motives which influence the best actions of public men. They think that public men change their course for corrupt motives, and their feeling is so predominant that the character of public men is injured, and their practical authority and influence impaired.

The Liberal Democrat and Conservative politicians who have joined together in Government have done so against many of their insincts, enduring "the severest sacrifices", because it is the right thing to do. Their actions and private thoughts since do not betray "corrupt motives" but the desire to work together in the national interest.

The Daily Telegraph's reaction to this is to injure the arrangement and impair its practical authority and influence. In these present circumstances, it is an arrangement far more conducive to sorting out our country's problems than a minority Conservative Government. We either like that, or we grin and bear it.

Regrettably, it is something that decision makers at the DT, in Peel's words, "do not and cannot comprehend".

Needless slaughter awaits if Conservatives can't get on message

Nearly two months ago, Michael Fallon became deputy chairman of the Conservative Party.  The appointment was greeted warmly by the likes of Benedict Brogan ("a smart appointment" of "an adept media performer") and Tim Montgomerie ("the thinking man's rottweiler") as a sign that the senior party in Government was sharpening up its communications strategy after what Paul Goodman described as a summer of "no effective counter-attack" to "the Labour and media assault on the Government."

Goodman, the former Conservative MP for Wycombe, said that the Government's cull of special advisers had "blunted its political edge".  The Coalition needed a simple message to counter the Labour opposition's crass but straightforward "Tory cuts" line.  This message must be communicated relentlessly through the media.  Crucially, the party needed "to find and unleash attack dogs."  Enter Michael Fallon, who Brogan nominated as "Minister for the Today Programme".

And the former MP for Darlington (I declare no interest) has made a steady - if inobtrusive - start.  Last Thursday, Fallon tore into shadow chancellor Alan Johnson's fallacious assertion that the Labour Government was "never living beyond our means."  As a member of the Treasury Select Committee between 1999 and 2010, Fallon knows keenly how deluded a statement this is.  He rightly declared it "as hollow as Gordon Brown's claim to have 'ended boom and bust'."

Then yesterday, Fallon picked up on the massive policy gulf between Mr Johnson and his leader, Ed Miliband on the 50p income tax rate and university funding.  Johnson, as the Labour minister who introduced tuition fees, is against a graduate tax, and on Sunday's Politics Show he admitted that his party had yet to agree on a "considered policy" on the top rate of tax.  Miliband wants to make it permanent but his shadow chancellor has said otherwise.

Michael Fallon said, "It's an extraordinary admission... Seven weeks after he was chosen, Ed Miliband still can't make up his mind - there's still no Plan A."

In two statements, Fallon is transmitting two simple political messages: 1) Remind the public of the hubristic hash that was Labour's economic mismanagement, and 2) Highlight the sclerotic, rudderless inertia and incertitude that is Labour in opposition - personified by the cleavage between Ed Miliband and Alan Johnson.

The Conservative Party needs a coherent, attacking message centred on these themes.  At the same time, reminding people that what the Government is doing is a good thing.  Tim Montgomerie writes today on Conservative Home, a right-wing political website, that David Cameron needs to make a quartet of political appointments to the Downing Street machine in order to address its weakness of message and capacity to drift.

Whilst I am a bit sceptical of Mr Montgomerie's motives in singling out specific names for specific jobs (maybe he is implicitly recommending a fifth position - himself, as No 10's HR manager), the point he makes is an important one.  The Prime Minister surrounds himself with people "he's comfortable with" and as a result "few people say uncomfortable things to him."  There is a genuine danger that too much of the Hilton-esque Big Society narrative - while it is sound and relevant (see Chris Butt on ConHome), it is terrible branding - is going straight over people's heads.  Conversely, the asinine but uncomplicated anti-cuts message from Labour is registering with the public (as recent opinion polls would suggest).

Someone does need to be ramming the message home that the cuts are not as bad as ideologically myopic elements of the media proclaim, and nor does the Labour Party have a credible alternative - or, for that matter, credibility.

If the Prime Minister has salaried space for an official photographer then I'm sure that he is able to find room for the sort of positions that Montgomerie has adumbrated.  Yet if you allow me to be uncharacteristically partisan for a brief moment, David Cameron remains head of a coalition government, transmitting a coalition message, from a coalition platform.  That was a mistake made in the summer in the form of Baroness Warsi and Chris Huhne's joint party-political press conference.

There needs to be a distinctive Conservative Party voice and the deputy chairman, Michael Fallon, should be it, and he should be heard louder and more frequently.  This is not a call to arms for a war of New Labour subterfuge and spin.  This is simply ensuring that the British public understand why this (Conservative led) Government is doing what it is doing.

Even in doing so, the party is bound to suffer to some extent in the provincial and local elections next May.  If the party fails to make this case, the suffering will become a slaughter.

Labour broke a tuition fees pledge too but Government still isn't making its case

The Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, faced a torrid time at PMQs yesterday as question (or should I say attack?) after question centred on tuition fees and higher education.

This is intensely difficult for all Liberal Democrat MPs, not least their leader, and the strain showed in his face.  His voice was hoarse with frustration and emotion as the half-hour trial neared its end.

That Labour introduced tuition fees against their own manifesto promise is something that the Government needs to remind people of, and Clegg mentioned this yesterday.  The Labour Party manifesto in 2001 contained the following promise:

"We will not introduce 'top-up' fees and have legislated to prevent them."

This is a point worth reiterating, yet only so far.  It was a long time ago now (most of the students protesting yesterday were still at primary school when that promise was made) and it does not make those photos of smiling Lib-Dem MPs holding NUS pledge placards disappear. There needs to be a better argument made about why the Government's plans for higher education are economically necessary and - I'm going to use two words I can't stand, sorry - fair and progressive.

The Government needs to be incorporating HE policy within its wider education programme, something I wrote about when Lord Browne published his review last month and again following David Willetts' statement to the House of Commons on 2nd November. The universities and skills minister did make the point that the HE reforms sit alongside other education reforms, such as the pupil premium and free schools.  Higher standards of assessment should also be added to that list.  But little has been heard of this line of argument since.  One senior source on the Liberal Democrat benches tells me that the Government needs to put this point across, as better schooling is vital to widening access to higher education.

Martin Horwood - as courageous as he was being the only Lib Dem MP to come out and face the music yesterday afternoon - didn't help the cause by responding to a bolshy student, "do you think the fairies are going to pay for your education?"

The argument that binmen and bricklayers shouldn't be paying their taxes to subsidise the education of university students has run its course.  The considerable value of a highly educated, graduate population is now self-evident, not least in that the UK's economic future lies in expert service industries and high technology.  Moreover, it is estimated that the UK's higher education's economic impact is in excess of £45 billion and the sector supports over 600,000 jobs.

So the Government must make the this argument and it must make it frequently: education is not a zero-sum game and universities are not an isolated part of the education system.   Reforms to higher education do not, on the face of it, appear to be good news but there is plenty of excellent material lying behind the fees increase, such as support for part-time students and reduced repayment costs for many as a result of the increased threshold.  There are many other positive reforms taking place in education as a whole, and the necessary reforms to higher education must be considered as one part of that longer, formative stage in  young people's lives.

Torn between head and heart on Control Orders?



Am I torn between head and heart? On one level, I don't think the general public gives two monkies if some shifty characters are put under near-perpetual house arrest (what is it, 40 over 5 years?) as long as the numbers are small and it strengthens our national security. If the head of MI5 says we need them, most people will say 'that's good enough for me' and move on to something that actually affects their day-to-day lives.

Yet that's the utilitarian view, and I don't believe that in this instance Bentham's principle of utility trumps the British principle of liberty and, particularly, habeas corpus. It is the legal foundation on which our constitution is built and is what set us apart from darker, more authoritarian Europe for centuries. Fine, the history of its implementation has not always been perfect, but it has been there as the starting point for liberty in this country.

So we have legal and ethical philosophy, history and tradition, pitted against cold utilitarianism and the harsh realities of governing compared to the bright idealism of opposition.

But hoestly, why wouldn't a security chief ask for more powers? Of course he would. Why wouldn't this make us safer? Of course it might, and probably does.

But that does not make it right. We are in this fight with radical, oppressive terrorist dogma in order to protect these hard-won and fiercely defended liberties. Should we really abandon them now? I do not believe, as some say, that abolition would be a sign of weakness in the eyes of terrorists. Instead, it is a sign of strength, it is a sign that we are unbowed, it is a sign that the way we live our lives, in freedom and toleration, shall not be compromised.

So no, I am not torn between head and heart. Both desire repeal of control orders. I can understand the rationale for their retention, but that rationale is not as strong as that for repeal.

Moreover, the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats have opposed control orders from their inception. The glue that binds the two parties together is civil liberties.

To turn their backs on that now would be to turn their backs on the philosophical basis on which this Coalition is built.

Control orders: the dilemma they didn't see coming?

St Julian of Norwich was one of England's most celebrated mystics, exalted for her perspicacious revelations of Jesus Christ, and religious teachings thereof.

Were St Julian to work her clairvoyancy on her feast day of 8th May 2010, as the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition coalesced in the wake of the inconclusive general election, she would have been likely to foresee three big banana peels: Europe, Trident and electoral reform.

Withal, one didn't have to be a saintly seer to pick out those three policy areas as obstacles to any deal between the parties, and I did exactly that on 8th May (soon after, I added tuition fees to that list).

Yet with remarkable ease have each of these policy land mines been adroitly averted.

The Government has talked tough on Europe but in practice has plotted a calmly conciliatory course.  Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary do not see this as a time to pick any fights over Europe.  Cameron unabashedly took some flak from the eurosceptic right last week about the EU budget.  That he has emerged essentially unscathed shows just how unimportant an issue Europe is right now.

Trident renewal seemed placed like a ticking time bomb within the Strategic Defence and Security Review but ended up a dud.  The expected fireworks did not materialise as the decision was deferred till a date beyond the coalition's allotted expiration.  Again, rightist elements repined briefly but fizzled out without a trace.

On electoral reform, the Liberal Democrats have been conceded a referendum on the Alternative Vote next May.  Conservative MPs cavilled at length about the the date of the vote and accompanying constituency changes but the Government has managed to get things through, not least because the No2AV campaign is confident of victory, constituency equalisation should favour the Conservatives, and a reduction in the number of MPs was a Conservative election pledge.

Even higher education funding, so important to the Liberal Democrats, has been managed without too damaging a fuss.  There will be significant concessions to coalition's junior partners as Lord Browne's more unpalatable recommendations are trimmed back, but it appears that the broader thrust of the proposals will be adopted - something that I thought unlikely only a few weeks ago.

So full marks to the coalition leadership for piloting their parliamentary parties through perilous terrains?

On the surface, yes.  However, in glibly thwarting those dangers, so consuming much energy and political capital, one can't help but feel that the Government has allowed one very serious issue to catch it cold: control orders.

Control orders were introduced in the UK by the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, and are a way of providing for a graduated scale of technological "prisons without bars" complicit with the European Convention on Human Rights.  They have been a focused target of civil liberty campaigners, legal challenges and parliamentary criticism.  Their passing was bloody and draining, with peers sitting for thirty hours straight attempting to amend the bill within which they were manifest.  The coalition Government commissioned a review of control orders under Lib-Dem peer Lord Macdonald, a former director a public prosecutions.  The review is due to report shortly.

Andrew Rawnsley, in this weekend's Observer, described "a commitment to liberty [as] the essential glue that binds the Tories and the Lib Dems."  Serendipitously, that is the same description - almost to the word - given to the Tory Reform Group conference on Saturday by Shami Chakribarti, director of Liberty.  They are both correct.  If anything united the two parties in their opposition to the last Labour administration - the most authoritarian in living memory - it was civil liberties.

Fast forward to the present and prominent Conservative ministers, including Grieve (Attorney-General), Ken Clarke (Justice Secretary), Pauline Neville-Jones (security minister) continue to make their opposition to control orders clear.  Dominic Raab MP has written that "sacrificing our liberties won't win the war against terror."  They are joined by Liberal Democrat colleagues such as Chris Huhne (Energy & Climate Change Secretary), who has condemned the policy as "Kafkaesque".  The Liberal Democrat manifesto said: "We believe that the best way to combat terrorism is to prosecute terrorists, not give away hard-won British freedoms."  The Coalition Agreement pledged to "reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties under the Labour Government", including the "protection of historic freedoms through the defence of trial by jury" and "safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation."

So, if the coalition partners broadly agree that control orders - a judicial instrument that subverts the centuries old edict of habeas corpus - are incompatible with the British values of liberty and right to a fair trial, why is there a crisis brewing?

In September, the head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, gave a speech in which he called for the retention of control orders, saying: "Terrorist threats can still exist which the criminal justice system cannot reach.  The government cannot absolve itself of the responsibility to protect its citizens just because the criminal law cannot, in the particular circumstances, serve the purpose."

This puts the Government in a terrible bind.  Ministers have set great stall on the importance of taking the advice of expert professionals, whether in the armed forces, the NHS, schools or the security services, and not dictating from Westminster and Whitehall.  Now the country's most senior internal security official insists that the "government cannot absolve itself of the responsibility to protect its citizens".

Does the Government, as this Telegraph leader implores, take Jonathan Evans' advice, for the sake of our national security?  After all, this dispute is being played out very publicly with the backdrop of explosive material being posted into the country on courier aircraft.

Or, does the Government honour the pledges made by both parties since 2005 to oppose, and then repeal, control orders?

In a word, yes.  I.D. cards have already been revoked and the detention of children at Yarl's Wood is being stopped.  Control orders have to be next in line.  This goes to the very core of why the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats are working together.  The official raison d'etre to this coalition, governing "in the national interest", is to reduce the deficit and restore the UK economy on to a sound footing.  This is the harsh, but necessary, intellectual rationale for the coming together of the two parties in a strong and stable government.  It is the head of the coalition.

But if the economy is driven by the coalition's head, then civil liberties are the beating of the coalition's heart.  On no other significant issue have Conservatives and Liberal Democrats been so consistently united.  The Government mustn't, shouldn't, cannot flinch now.

I do not doubt that there is some truth in what security chiefs are saying.  The eradication of control orders would remove a potentially useful protective and pre-emptive capability.  However, that does not make retaining them the right thing to do.  The battle that we are waging is one of liberty and toleration versus suppression and intolerance.  Control orders are designed - in good faith - to assist in winning this battle.  However, they are a deeply illiberal way of doing so.

Dominic Grieve, when he was still the Conservatives' Shadow Attorney-General, said in the House of Commons on 10th March 2005:

"Government Members yesterday suggested that the need for security was so great that any infringement of liberty might be tolerated.  We disagree profoundly with the Government on that point."

It is to be hoped that this coalition Government, which has professed to restore the essential liberties curtailed by the last Government, does not have to face a similar charge.

The indecisiveness apparent in the government machinery is regrettable and it smacks of a woeful lack of preparation.  Yet this can all be averted by making the right decision.  Ministers talk a lot about having to take very difficult decisions in the national interest.  This one is relatively straightforward.

A Falklands War might not repeat itself, but a conflict could

Once elected to govern, the Conservatives embarked on the unenviable task of resurrecting the British economy. A Labour Government headed by a former Chancellor, who had replaced the elected Prime Minister halfway through the parliamentary term, bequeathed an economy in ruins.  The nation was mired in strike action or threats of action.  The spending cuts that followed were so severe, and the dosage of economic medicine so distasteful, that the Government was at risk of decimation at the next election by a Labour Party that, although divided, offered a radically different vision for the country.

The only thing that saved the Government was a victorious campaign in the far-off Falkland Islands.  Swept along by a jingoistic tide, the Conservative Party was returned the following election by a landslide and the economic recovery continued apace.

Sound familiar?

If it does, that is because we are living through it.  It is happening around us.  Apart from the last paragraph, this refers to the 1980s only.  Or does it?

Actually, in these non-partisan times – with civil partnerships enacted on the steps of Number 10 – I feel compelled to be a touch fairer.  The economy was not bequeathed to Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe “in ruins” in 1979.  In fact, thanks largely to the straitening stipulations of the IMF, but also in no small part to Mr Callaghan’s recognition that the Labour Government “couldn’t spend its way out of a recession”, the Conservatives inherited a Britain in which all major economic indicators were on the up.  The painful recession of the early 1980s was almost entirely a result of the painful but necessary restructuring and rebalancing of the UK economy enforced by Mrs Thatcher and her ‘dries’.

I would also argue that the Conservative Party would have won the 1983 general election without the Falklands campaign (although not here, that can wait for another time).

Nevertheless, I concede that on that assertion I am in a minority.  It is the overwhelming academic consensus that it was the ‘Falklands factor’ – and not the stirrings of economic resurgence, nascently upward poll ratings, a split left-wing vote and “the longest suicide note in history” – that handed Mrs Thatcher a second term.

However much Mrs Kirchner and her beleaguered Argentine government wish to indulge in sabre rattling, she is no General Galtieri at the head of a murderous and inept military junta (actually, ineptitude they might aspire to).  Moreover, Hilary Clinton can play the role of impartial observer as much as she likes but the simple fact is this: the Falkland Islands are British sovereign territory, this is backed up by international law and for as long as the Kelpers wish this to remain the case it will be so.

Of course, there is always a modicum of possibility that Argentina will try to retake the islands by force.  After all, the British armed forces, waging as they are an energy and resource sapping war in Afghanistan and only recently disentangled from southern Iraq, are hardly in a position to respond.  Yet this simply is not going to happen.  In comparison to 1982, the islands are heavily protected by RAF Mount Pleasant with its 2,000 personnel, Eurofighter Typhoons, and Sikorsky and Sea King helicopters.

However, the recent discovery by Rockhopper Exploration of sizeable oil reserves in the North Falkland Basin has elevated the ongoing dispute from minor irritation to a potential flashpoint.  Rockhopper will provide an estimation for the size of these reserves within the next couple of weeks but advance expectations are high.

The possibility of finding oil in the area has been mooted as a factor in Mrs Thatcher’s decision to reclaim the islands in 1982.  If so (and I doubt it, the sovereignty and self-determination case is stronger) then large deposits will soon put the Falkland Islanders on a par with the Norwegians and begin to pay back Britain for the services rendered in blood and treasure during the war and since.

Now let us suppose that drilling and extraction begins midway through David Cameron’s first term.  Argentina, eyeing these oil wells as a last-ditch lucrative counter to their own fiscal woes, send in the gunships and blockade the North Falkland Basin.  This would be in direct contravention of international law but did that stop the junta in 1982?  Of course not.  Did the absence of a second UN resolution stop us joining the Americans in invading Iraq in 2003?  Not for a moment.

Let us return to this vision of the future.  Cameron and Clegg’s coalition government is fraying at the edges in the face of massive opposition from a British public disbelieving (or refusing to understand) the necessity of the rebalancing of the public finances, with “cuts deeper than under Margaret Thatcher”, to paraphrase another former Chancellor of the Exchequer.

An Argentine armada sets sail for the Falkland Islands, blockading Stanley, bombing Mount Pleasant, seizing an offshore oil rig and capturing a couple of vessels, inflicting a handful of unnecessary casualties in the process. 

Our troops and America’s had left Afghanistan a year previously, midway through 2011 as planned, freeing up regiments and materiel for another courageous expedition to the South Atlantic.  President Obama is fighting an uphill battle to be re-elected for a second term in the face of the belligerent, nonsensical populism of a Palin-led Republican Party.  The President does not want to be seen abandoning the Special Relationship amidst this hostile political climate so although remaining nominally neutral the US fights Britain’s corner in the corridors of the UN and its Latin American backyard.  Cameron is criticised by colonial apologists in some sections of the press but generally applauded for his strong and decisive action.

After a brief, tense stand-off between Argentine and British naval forces, with shots fired across bows but no fatalities, Argentina backs down under the weight of international opprobrium and Britain’s greater military strength and resolve.  “GOTCHA”, the Sun is delighted to repeat its famous front page of yesteryear.

David Cameron’s coalition government survives to complete its five-year parliamentary term and the Conservative Party is re-elected with a landslide majority.

Fanciful?  Time shall tell.