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Encouraging Signs From The British Coalition

Remember when Daniel Hannan warned gravely of the tyrannical threat of coalition government? As Hannan put it then: The Westminster system, as favoured in most Anglosphere countries, encourages a clear division between government and opposition. This division helps keep the state small and the citizen free [bold mine-DL]. The party that is out of office […]

Remember when Daniel Hannan warned gravely of the tyrannical threat of coalition government? As Hannan put it then:

The Westminster system, as favoured in most Anglosphere countries, encourages a clear division between government and opposition. This division helps keep the state small and the citizen free [bold mine-DL]. The party that is out of office has every reason to resist the expansion of state powers, while the party in office is wary of building a government machine that must one day fall into the hands of its opponents.

And again:

A ministry of all the talents, an end to partisan bickering, a national consensus – such have been the justifications of every dictatorship in history, from Bonaparte’s onwards.

Yes, well, it doesn’t seem to be working out that way. Here is the civil liberties section of the British coalition government’s agenda:

We will implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties and roll back state intrusion.

We will introduce a Freedom Bill.

We will scrap the ID card scheme, the National Identity register and the ContactPoint database, and halt the next generation of biometric passports.

We will outlaw the finger-printing of children at school without parental permission.

We will extend the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency.

We will adopt the protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database.

We will protect historic freedoms through the defence of trial by jury.

We will restore rights to non-violent protest.

We will review libel laws to protect freedom of speech.

We will introduce safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation.

We will further regulate CCTV.

We will end the storage of internet and email records without good reason.

We will introduce a new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences.

We will establish a Commission to investigate the creation of a British Bill of Rights that incorporates and builds on all our obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights, ensures that these rights continue to be enshrined in British law, and protects and extends British liberties. We will seek to promote a better understanding of the true scope of these obligations and liberties.

This is an encouraging beginning, and if the coalition can actually implement most or all of these measures it will have already done a lot to vindicate the coalition arrangement as a good one for Britain. I would add that this part of the agenda would probably be much less extensive and ambitious if the Liberal Democrats were not part of the government. Refreshingly, the perpetual no-hopers seem to have held on to their policy priorities now that they are in government. A Conservative minority government would probably not have troubled itself with as much of this. A Conservative majority government would have had the luxury of retaining many of the abusive Labour policies they inherited, knowing that the Labour opposition would not challenge practices that they implemented while in power.

Far from providing a check on expansive and intrusive government, the duopoly that prevailed earlier created a system in which both major parties were complicit in intrusive measures and each had incentives to collaborate with the other in crafting intrusive measures. As we can see in our own two-party system, the party out of power will tend to work with the governing party in expanding the reach of the security and surveillance state, because neither wants to deprive its future administrations of the power that these measures provide and neither wants to expose itself to the other’s attacks that it is “weak” on national security. Evidently, it takes the presence of a junior coalition partner strongly interested in civil liberties to begin rolling back some of these intrusions.

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