Allan Massie: Watch out for our surveillance state

Westminster’s plan for authorities to monitor calls, e-mails, texts and internet are an affront to individual liberty, writes Allan Massie

In 1940 when, as he wrote, “highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me,” George Orwell could still declare that in England, “the liberty of the individual is still believed in, almost as in the nineteenth century”.

He said “England”, but he might have said “Britain”, and in any case the two terms were often synonymous for him, as they were, and are, to many Englishmen, and indeed had been to Scots – for example, Stevenson, quite often in the Victorian Age. The liberty he spoke of had “nothing to do with economic liberty”. It was “the liberty to have a home of your own” and to lead a private life free from the prying eyes of officialdom. “The most hateful of all names in an English ear is Nosey Parker.”

How long ago it seems. The state, which once played little part in most people’s lives, now keeps tabs on us all. We live in a surveillance society, with more CCTV cameras than any other country in Europe. It is now easy for the police to get authority to tap telephones, to enter private houses and remove property such as laptops, and even, in defiance of habeas corpus, for the courts to hold suspects in prison for long periods without bringing them to trial.

Now the coalition government is proposing legislation which will extend the power of the state even further. This would allow them to monitor the calls, e-mails, text messages and internet activity of everybody in the United Kingdom in real time. Both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats expressed outrage when similar legislative plans were announced by the Labour government, but seemingly things look different when you are in power.

Home Secretary Theresa May tells us that “the internet can be abused by criminals, paedophiles and terrorists who want to cover their tracks and keep their communications secret,” and that the government “has a responsibility to keep the British people safe”. No-one need dispute either statement. But, as David Davis, one of the few politicians who seems determined to uphold our liberties, remarks, the government has sufficient powers to fulfil that responsibility already. No doubt the internet can be abused, as Theresa May says; so can almost everything, including shop notice boards where, for example, “Vacuum cleaner for sale, almost new”, might be code for “bombing plan on schedule”.

The Home Secretary seems determined to extend the scope of the surveillance state, simply because she can do so. Yet the evidence is that our security services are already doing their job effectively, without the new powers she wants to give them. Since the 7/7 London Tube bombings in 2005, there has been no death in England as a result of a terrorist attack. There has been one in Scotland, and the dead man was the terrorist, Kafeel Ahmed, who drove a propane-loaded 4x4 into a door at Glasgow Airport. Various other terrorist plots have been foiled, and the would-be terrorists arrested, tried and imprisoned.

There in an essential difference between a liberal-democratic state and a totalitarian one. In the former it is assumed that the government, police and security services will not go digging about in the private lives of citizens unless there is good reason to suspect them either of having broken the law or of conspiring or preparing to do so. We are presumed to be innocent of illicit or evil intent, unless there is evidence to the contrary. Totalitarian states start from the opposite assumption; that is why they routinely spy on citizens. We still, in a liberal-democratic state, regard the police and the security services as our servants; in a dictatorship or totalitarian state, they are the masters.

Every infringement of individual liberty, every invasion of privacy, every extension of the state’s powers of supervision, represents a shift in the balance. It is a move away from the assumption of innocence towards the presumption of guilt.

Those who see nothing wrong in the further extension of the powers of authority, and say, complacently, “if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear”, miss the point. Supervision – the awareness that you are under surveillance – is oppressive. Suppose you have a neighbour who watches your every move, who looks into your front room window every time he passes, gazes at you in the garden, or monitors your comings and goings. How do you feel? Resentful? Anxious? Oppressed? Angry? Afraid? Whichever it is, your enjoyment of your home is likely to be impaired. You have done nothing wrong; yet you are likely to feel ill at ease.

The state is that nosey neighbour, prying into your private life. Unless there is reason to suppose you have broken the law, or evidence that you are intent on doing so, the state is no more entitled to know which websites you are consulting than to learn which books you are buying or borrowing from your local library.

It has no more right to know whom you are e-mailing than to know whom you are talking to in your local pub. Your text messages are no more its business than is your conversation over the garden wall.

Over the last quarter century, the British government has become more and more intrusive, and our right to privacy has been gradually whittled away. It is bizarre that, since the European Convention on Human Rights was incorporated into our law, respect for the liberty of the individual citizen has diminished, and, as this proposed extension of state surveillance makes clear, we are all viewed with suspicion by authority. Hitherto, invasion of privacy has required a warrant from a magistrate, senior judge, or cabinet minister. If Theresa May’s proposed legislation is allowed to reach the statute book, this will no longer be necessary.

Yet no good reason has been advanced to justify this move towards a police state in which we are all regarded with suspicion as potential criminals. The state and its organs have huge powers already, powers which, if proposed a couple of generations ago, would have been regarded with incredulity. Further extension of these powers, is deplorable, and should be opposed by any parliamentarian who has a respect for the idea of liberty, the presumption of innocence, and .the right to privacy.

It is time to say “no – not a step further”, and tell your MP to oppose the Bill when it comes before parliament, if he or she wants your vote at the next election.