Good Old Magna Carta

David Davis

Now I take David Davis’s resignation of his seat in the House of Commons at face value and believe he is entirely sincere in his campaign to stop the habitual push back of civil liberties in the UK and the creation of a surveillance society where we are treated not as citizens but as suspects. Indeed I have articulated similar concerns about abuse of Police powers and the creation of a Surveillance Society, and a frequently incompetent one at that. Davis was pushed over the edge by the squalid deal (£200 m, you don’t need to know the depressing details but look on Slugger O’Toole on my Blog Roll if you do!) with 9 Irish DUP MP’s to allow civil liberties in England to be curtailed. Gordon Brown has denied a deal but in the immortal words of Mandy Rice Davies, you would expect him to say that. Indeed the habitual abuse of section 7 of the Terrorism Act by the Coppers is proof that where civil liberties and Police Powers are concerned if you give them an inch they’ll take a yard. It was also why, if we were arrested, we would have to be charged promptly. We knew that to give police the power to lock people up for weeks on end while they went looking for evidence was a recipe for serious abuse.

David Davis, a former SAS Territorial who believes in the death penalty for pre-meditated murder, is still an unlikely hero of liberal Britain in sacrificing his political career to launch a one-man crusade against the Government's plan for suspected terrorists to be detained for 42 days without charge.

Mr Davis knows that. He thinks it is more important to make a stand now; that 42-day detention is such an infringement of our liberties dating back to Magna Carta that his ambitions must take second place. It may sound pious in the Westminster village but it may play well in the real world, where people have switched off from political parties – the MPs and MEPs who fiddle their expenses and do grubby backroom deals, as Mr Brown did to squeak through 42-day detention with the votes of nine Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) MPs who are normally natural bedfellows of the Tories.

It was the manner of Mr Brown's hollow victory that pushed Mr Davis over the edge. He was spitting blood that the Prime Minister had resorted to offering "30 pieces of silver" to the DUP to overturn civil rights enjoyed in Britain for 800 years. Mr Davis is already planning his campaign for an "anti-Big Brother by-election" on 10 July. He wants to start a debate on aspects of Britain's "surveillance society", including what he regards as "the most intrusive identity card system in the world" and the scale of the DNA database.

So I should be applauding David Davis’s campaign, but I find I’m not. Indeed I agree with Michael Heseltine and Norman Tebbit who represent the two polar opposites in the Tory Party who coincidently used the same word to describe Davis’s action – “Incomprehensible.” Whatever his feelings resigning from Parliament and causing (at some expense to you and I) a by election is hubris and grandstanding of a high order. What could he possibly achieve when the two main parties won’t run against him and his opponent will be the Rent-a-Goon impersonator Kelvin McKenzie? Indeed what debate will he provoke which he couldn’t provoke as Shadow Home Secretary? Indeed who is he campaigning against, the Labour or the Conservative Party?


King John signing Magna Carta

I share David Davis’s concern that the thrust of the Magna Carta is being blunted. That one of the great values of being a British citizen has been the strong sense that we are not here at the behest of the state; the state is here at our behest. That was why policemen could not just stop us and demand to know who we were or where we were going. However his tactics are misplaced and misguided and far from resonating with the populace I believe they will echo the comedian Tony Hancock’s words;

“We should always defend Magna Carta, after all he died for our freedom.”

"No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor will we send upon him except upon the lawful judgment of his peers or the law of the land."

Magna Carta; Article 39 – 1215 AD