Damian Green MP speaks to ResPublica

ResPublica was delighted to host an evening speech by Shadow Immigration Minister, Damian Green MP, on the subject of civil liberties, entitled ‘Poor People Need Civil Liberties Too,’ at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts on Tuesday 2nd March.

There are many aspects of the modern Conservative Party which are significant changes from the Conservatism of recent years. Both in tone and content it is clear, and welcome, that the Party under David Cameron is recognisably living in the 21st century and grappling with the problems of modern Britain. Some of these changes are rediscoveries of the best aspects of historic Conservatism, and one of the most important is our determination to help the poorest and most disadvantaged. You can call this One Nation Conservatism, Tory Reform, Compassionate Conservatism or even Red Toryism, but whatever the name it represents the same decent instinct: that we have a duty to help those who need help, and that such help is the mark of a civilised society.

My purpose today is to argue that an essential part of the help we need to give the disadvantaged is the personal space, ability to control their own lives and freedom from the dictates of a nannying state that add up to what we call “civil liberties.” On the surface this is a counter-intuitive argument. Surely civil liberties are only of concern to a few middle-class do-gooders with more compassion than sense? Surely what the people living on our toughest estates demand is a more controlled society to protect them from their neighbours? And even if they don’t want it, surely the tabloids will demand that political parties stick to a superficially tough agenda? Civil liberties, the argument runs, are a luxury item for politicians, not to be contemplated in a recession when fear of crime and disorder is rampant.

What has gone wrong?

To those who argue this I say, look at the world around you. This is precisely the policy that has been practised in recent years, and it is failing. We see the results in today’s Broken Society. Look at the tough measures that this Government has introduced.

An initiative designed to keep young people out of the court system is pre-court disposal orders, over two hundred thousand of which were issued to young people for first or second time minor offences in 2007-08. These include Anti-Social Behaviour Orders. In the decade from 1997 to 2007, almost fifteen thousand ASBOs were issued. How effective they are is disputed, with almost two thirds of under-18s breaching their ASBO conditions.

The Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003 gave police new powers to disperse groups of two or more young people in authorised areas. Home Office estimates show that there are over 1,000 designated dispersal zones in England and Wales.

A controversial measure is stop and search. There were over a million stop and searches of people last year, with the Metropolitan Police accounting for almost forty percent of all stop and searches recorded in England and Wales. Some of these were under section 44 for terrorism purposes, which the Government’s own Independent Reviewer of Terrorism has criticized for being used inappropriately, saying that “examples of poor or unnecessary use of section 44 abound.”

Britain leads the world in the use of CCTV, with an estimated four million cameras in the UK. Almost sixty thousand of these are controlled by local authorities, which equates to 1 council-owned CCTV camera for every 1000 people in the country. Walking down the street in England a person can be captured by up to thirty cameras in one day.

And our children are on more and more Government databases. The largest of these, ContactPoint, was set up under the Children Act 2004 and will hold basic information on all children under 18 in England. As of last March there were 12.4 million records on ContactPoint with a further 445,000 records in the archive.

This is in addition to the National Pupil Database of all children in state education, including nurseries; the National Childhood Obesity Database; and the Child Benefits Database.

The Home Office also has a database for children, the ONSET database, which is based on predictions of which children will offend in the future. In 2009 almost sixteen thousand children and young people had an ONSET assessment.

An area of concern for me personally is the National DNA Database, which holds profiles of over one in ten percent of the population, including over a million innocent people. At the time the profiles were taken, approximately twenty percent of the five million profiles were from those aged under 18 - 1 million children.

The picture today

Then look at the results of this so-called toughness.

There has been a substantial rise in youth crime, with over a fifth of under 16 year olds admitting that they committed a crime in the last 12 months, and thirty percent saying carried a knife or gun in the same period.

Almost seventy thousand under 18s were prosecuted against for indictable offences in 2007, accounting for 16.5% of all indictable offence prosecutions. Fifty thousand of these were convicted of an indictable offence, a figure which has been rising since 2003.

There were over a million violent crimes in the last year for which we have figures, and almost a million people were the victims of alcohol-related attacks.

And whilst there is one surveillance camera for every 14 people in the UK, some studies suggest that between 60% and 80% of the images they produce are judged inadmissible in court due to their poor quality.

The effects are also seen in our education system. In the last academic year there were 8,130 permanent exclusions from all schools – a significant number. But look at the figure for fixed period exclusions from state funded secondary schools - 324,180. Children who are eligible for free schools meals are around 3 times more likely to receive either a permanent or fixed period exclusion than children who are not eligible for free school meals.

And the rise of NEETs - young people not in education, employment or training has resulted in the latest figures for England showing that that seventeen percent of those aged 18-24 years old were classed this way in the last quarter of 2009. Half a million young people are claiming Incapacity Benefit and one in six children in the UK grows up in a workless household, the highest rate in the whole of Europe.

What next?

It is staring us in the face that toughness on its own is not enough. We have gone down the route of more policing, more intrusion, more databases, more surveillance, and more lecturing. The result is a divided, broken society.

Despite their claims about promoting equality, opportunities to rise up the socio-economic scale have lessened under this Government – the National Equality Panel recently concluded that “There are profound differences at neighbourhood level, between areas with higher and lower levels of deprivation…. The median equivalent net income in the poorest tenth of areas in England is 30 per cent below that for the rest of the country. Median total wealth in the poorest tenth of areas is only 16 per cent of the national median.” The report also states that while social background really matters, “Rather than being fixed at birth, these differences widen through childhood”. As Milton Friedman put it, “A society that puts equality ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom”.

So the protections and help we are offering the poorest are not working for them in the long term.

Of course we need better and more effective policing everywhere, and perhaps especially in areas with a combination of disadvantages. I am not arguing that the state should stop trying to protect and encourage the poor, rather that it has been short-sighted and ineffective in the way it has tried to do so.

We have become a ‘walk-on by’ society, with Labour’s top-down approach to fighting crime tying up the police in red tape and performance targets. A recent report concluded that one result of this is to have created a nation of ‘passive bystanders’, with six out of ten people unwilling for example, to intervene to stop a group of 14-year-old youths vandalising a bus shelter.

To help prevent this Conservatives believe that early intervention is crucial. Experience from New York and other American cities proves that early diagnosis and intervention are of vital importance when fighting the spread of disorder. We will intervene early to tackle antisocial behaviour, building into our strategies support for community and voluntary sector groups that can have a hugely positive role to play in re-engaging young offenders, some of whom have become completely alienated from society.

We would scrap unnecessary schemes such as Contact Point for children and reform the use of some of the most intrusive databases; such as removing the innocent from the DNA database.

But looking around modern Britain with eyes open it is clear that even the best “broken windows” style policing, combined with extra help for children and all the current panoply of measures to reduce inequality may be necessary but are not sufficient. If we actually want a long term sustainable improvement in the lives families and communities you need a proper civil society. This is where my thoughts become counter-intuitive because civil society on the ground, in the council estate, cannot exist unless the individuals living there are full citizens.

What does that entail? It means you need to restore trust between the people themselves, as well as between individuals and the state. The difficult part of this—the part that runs counter to conventional wisdom-- is that they cannot demonstrate this trust unless they themselves have the freedom to express it. If you need CCTV to protect you from your neighbour or her children, then the CCTV may give you some short-term relief, except when it’s smashed or no one is monitoring it, but it will not provide long-term confidence that your streets or your tower block are safe. That only comes when, to use an old-fashioned working class phrase, everyone is looking out for everyone else.

The citizen and the state

If we are to start treating people as full citizens, with the full range of civil liberties, including the right not to be spied on, not to be put on a database on the off-chance, not to be constantly supervised by the state’s enforcement mechanisms, we, and they, need a bonding framework. Successful communities have this, as do successful societies. It derives from a sense of mutual responsibility which can only be exercised as a matter of free choice. You can penalise someone for dropping litter, if you are prepared to pay for a warden on every street corner 24 hours a day, but you cannot force them to think, when they leave their front door, what can I do to improve this area?

Since only truly free people can exercise these responsibilities, we should ask which freedoms particularly contribute to this instilling of civic responsibility. I believe it is the freedom to make some decisions about the vital local services which are at the heart of any community.

David Cameron has said that “where Labour think that an individual’s identity consists in being recognised, registered and assisted by the state, Conservatives think that identity is derived though membership is society. Labour thinks that social justice means equality, achieved and guaranteed by government. We think it means community, built and maintained by people themselves.”

For example, the ability to exercise some control over your local school, or at the very least the chance to choose whether it is suitable for your child, is key. Michael Gove’s proposals to open up the school network to new entrants is therefore not just an educational step forward, but a contribution to freedom and civic responsibility.

Similarly, we should give more power to local communities to decide on the buildings that surround them. Not just the number of houses but the design priorities of the estate. The rat runs that we used to build on council estates were never popular with the people that lived there. Nor was the idea of parking cars out of sight. The people who live in an area should be trusted to run their own children’s leisure facilities. They really care about them. They should be enabled to have a much greater input into the local policing priorities.

Trust the poor

The argument against this, which is never quite put explicitly, is that this level of freedom and control is impossible for the poor. It is regarded as too risky. If we respond to the breakdown in society that has happened in some parts of the country with a reduction in state control, surely the result will be that the criminal will simply prey ever more easily on the respectable? I think we must challenge this outlook, not just because it is patronising and insulting, but also because it is a counsel of despair. If we start from the presumption that a significant percentage of our fellow citizens are permanently incapable of exercising full civic rights, then we will never live in a stable and relaxed country.

Instead we should look at some of the institutions which benefit from attracting people from this background. There are sadly no figures available about the socio-economic background of those who join the Army, but it is clear that a large number of the brave men and women on the front line come from disadvantaged backgrounds, as they always have done. This means that some of the most self-disciplined people in the country, whose life’s work involves looking out for others as well as themselves, were brought up in the areas we lazily think contain none of these virtues.

We should also look at our own history. The Workers’ Education Associations are, sadly for a Conservative like me, seen as part of the rise of the Labour Party. But the desire of those who would otherwise find their chances in life restricted to haul themselves up through education was admirable then and would be the same now. I feel this very personally as my own family were classic Welsh working class. My parents knew that education was the way out of a constricted vision of life. Some of my family became teachers, but all of them knew that you could take control of your own life if you were prepared to work at it. This is the same driving force that motivated many of the ethnic minority communities when they first arrived here. There is a wrong-headed insulting view that the poor are poor because they are feckless. Some are, just like some very affluent people are, but the vast majority are not.

Conclusion

It may seem that I have drifted away from arguments about civil liberties. But I base my contention that civil liberties are essential for the most disadvantaged on the proposition that they should not be treated differently from the comfortable and affluent. One Nation should mean one set of rules for all, and one set of rights for all. There is such a thing as society; it’s just not the same as the state.

On top of that proposition I argue the need for personal and community empowerment. What we need is to help the formation of self-run bodies by independent people. Self policing is the best and most effective policing. Problems like vandalism and graffiti which so enrage people are most likely to be minimised if the buildings, the flower beds, the very streets, feel as though they belong to the whole local community. If your children have planted the bulbs or painted the community centre, they are less likely to damage them in a fit of bored rebellion.

We are about to have an Election. At this election voters will have a choice - and I hope they will vote for change. One big change we need is to set the people free. Trust the people, in that grand old Tory phrase which should still be a guiding light to us. I know this sounds risky and over-optimistic. But what is the alternative? More and more control? Increasing public spending to hold down an underclass we have written off? This would be both expensive and dehumanising. In the long run, it would also be a failure. You cannot run a modern democratic country in which your civil liberties depend on where you live, what you earn, and where your children go to school. Civil liberties are the liberties of every citizen from the richest to the poorest. We should defend and enhance them, for everyone.