Lesley Riddoch: Big Sister Theresa May is watching

British Prime Minister Theresa May. Picture: Getty

Is Britain being Trumped?

With public attention focused on Europe and America, is Theresa May taking advantage of a distracted public and an apparent rightward lurch in Anglo-American social attitudes to slip through some of the Donald’s illiberal policies here?

A BBC Radio News bulletin this weekend announced that plans to “update” the Official Secrets Act could lead to journalists being jailed for up to 14 years.

The new Espionage Bill – the product of a recent Law Commission review – will let courts impose jail terms on journalists containing “sensitive information” about the economy. In theory, a journalist who leaked Brexit documents could face the clink.

What?

Yip, it seems the Law Commission’s proposals also remove a statutory public interest defence by anyone, including journalists. The consultation is open until 3 April.

According to Jim Killock, chief executive of the Open Rights Group: “This is clearly an attempt to criminalise… the act of handling leaked documents which would prevent the public from knowing when the government is breaking the law. It is fundamentally un-British to try to control journalists in this way. It is completely unreasonable to equate any leak of secret information as an act of espionage.”

Un-British – is it really?

A few months ago, the Investigatory Powers Act let Theresa May create an extensive database of personal information about British citizens via internet service providers (ISPs) who must now store detailed information about their customers: websites visited, apps opened, devices used, plus locations and times of use.

One commentator said: “A bill giving the UK intelligence agencies… the most sweeping surveillance powers in the western world has passed into law with barely a whimper, meeting only token resistance over the past 12 months from inside parliament and barely any from outside.”

US whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted: “The UK has just legalised the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy. It goes further than many autocracies.”

Well, it looks like Britain’s extreme surveillance will soon be matched with an extreme press clampdown, because the draconian Espionage Bill attracted next to no analysis in the Sunday press. I began to wonder if I had simply imagined hearing about it until I spotted a tweet by ITN’s political correspondent Robert Peston: “Proposal to jail journalists for publishing economically harmful official info is so nuts that it’s beyond parody.” But not so nuts that it made a single front-page in any of the weekend newspapers. There was a detailed article in the Telegraph which has obvious skin in the game having published a series of important political leaks ranging from the MPs’ expenses scandal in 2009 to a secret Brexit memo in November which suggested Britain would not be offered single market membership. This revelation would doubtless have fallen foul of the new restrictions since any more bad news about the slow-motion crash that is Brexit will undoubtedly cause market jitters.

But apart from the Telegraph, that was it. No press outcry – just like the very muted response to the Investigatory Powers Act.

Do editors know the proposed Espionage Act will fail to make it through the Commons? Are they running scared of a Government and a public that doesn’t rate press freedom very highly in this “post truth” world or is the future of John Bercow really so much more important?

Whatever the reason there’s a worrying parallel with actions across the Big Pond where it’s rumoured President Trump plans to evict the press from the White House – one of his senior officials has described journalists as “the opposition party”– after refusing to take a question from a CNN correspondent on the grounds that he and CNN produce “fake news.”

But of course, a hysterical approach to journalists is not the only recent import from Donald Trump’s America.

Last week, as outrage over his Muslim travel ban reverberated around the world, the UK government axed a scheme to help lone vulnerable child refugees less than a year after it was introduced. “Great” Britain had accepted just 350 children, barely one-tenth of the 3,000 requested by 84-year-old peer Lord Alfred “Alf” Dubs, who was saved from Nazi persecution before the Second World War and who helped create the scheme through which 3,000 refugee children were expected to find sanctuary in the UK.

Lots of eminent people begged Theresa May to reconsider – including the First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the daughter of “Britain’s Schindler,” Sir Nicholas Winton. Barbara Winton, said the refugee ban echoed the “terrible failures of the human spirit that, on the eve of the Second World War, saw country after country close its borders to Jewish refugees in urgent need of protection”.

She might as well have been talking to herself.

Now the British government has also closed its borders to refugee children, trying to hide behind the false explanation that the French government was worried about encouraging traffickers. As award-winning foreign editor David Pratt observed this weekend: “If refugee children, often alone and always vulnerable, are not fully deserving of help, then we have no right to speak meaningfully of ‘values’.”

Quite. The EU’s criminal intelligence agency Europol suggests 10,000 unaccompanied child refugees have disappeared after reaching Europe, many falling into the hands of criminal trafficking syndicates. But no matter.

In the wake of the Donald’s protracted battle to keep refugees out of the US, Home Secretary Amber Rudd saw an opportunity to do much the same here and axed the scheme just hours before the Brexit bill vote. Happily, her shameful attempt to bury bad news didn’t pass unnoticed. But the repugnant policy still stands.

Is the Trump-style crackdown on refugees and the press un-British – who knows these days? Is it un-Scottish – for sure.

I’d love to see Nicola Sturgeon call the Prime Minister’s bluff and ask for permission to accept the remaining 2650 child refugees here. Of course such a move is not technically within the gift of Holyrood, but if each large council could take 100 children and volunteers organised themselves as communities in Fife, Angus and Bute have already done, it might be practically possible.

The narrow vote to remain within the UK didn’t give the British government carte blanche to sign away hard-won civil liberties. Scots needs to find a way to remind Theresa May of that fact.