Welcome to Britain where we arrest the opposition!

The British public and international community have regularly been subject to Gordon Brown’s high and mighty moral rhetoric concerning the tragic situation in Zimbabwe in recent years and the country’s fruitcake dictator. Although like Mugabe Brown was personally not elected to Britain’s highest office (although no Prime Minister is), he isn’t in the same league of feckless and ruthless leaders. However, Brown did take a step closer to practicing Mugabe’s greatest hits when the police arrested a member of the Conservative opposition’s shadow cabinet Damien Green who apparently leaked some information embarrassing to the government. Now I’m not one to stick up for politicians, let alone Conservative politicians, but as Tony Benn pointed out on Channel 4 news this evening, it’s absolutely bizarre that a sitting MP and prominent member of the opposition would be arrested without warning and in contempt of parliament.

Green was apparently held for 9 hours of questioning and had been arrested under anti-terror legislation. Funny how the government branded those who took issue with the updated terror legislation as too soft and worrying unnecessarily about the probability that people could be arrested for non-terrorist crimes. It seems Green was treated in an aggressive manner and his personal emails and text messages going back months sifted through. I’m sure it was an important part of finding out about a leaked government document…

The following is from The Guardian website;

“David Cameron, the Conservative leader, who has given Green his full backing, said that ministers and the police needed to explain why such heavy-handed tactics were employed.

He said it was “a worrying stage in our democracy” if shadow ministers could not release information in the national interest.

“If this had happened in the 1930s, Churchill would have been arrested,” said Cameron, referring to the way Winston Churchill used leaked information to support his campaign for Britain to rearm against Adolf Hitler’s Germany.

Michael Howard, the former Tory leader and an ex-home secretary, said the decision to arrest Green could be seen as a “contempt of parliament” – an offence against parliament which in the pre-democratic age would result in culprits being jailed – and he said that there were “real questions” about the incident for Brown to answer.

“Gordon Brown made his reputation by very effectively exploiting government leaks when he was in opposition. Now, are we to have one law for Gordon Brown and a different law for everybody else?” Howard said, in an interview on the BBC’s World at One.

“What we need to know from the prime minister is what he thinks about this. Does he agree that it’s essential for opposition politicians to be able to make use of leaked documents, as he did? If this approach had been in place when Gordon Brown was in opposition, he would have spent half his time under arrest.”"

Tony Benn, the Labour former cabinet minister, also said that the arrest had serious constitutional consequences.

“I may sound strangely medieval, but once the police can interfere with parliament, I tell you, you are into a police state. Parliament is a safeguard against the abuse of power and once you start clamping down on it you are saying goodbye to the freedom that parliament gives you,” Benn told The World at One.

MPs have been particularly alarmed by the manner of Green’s arrest. The police seized his phone and his computer, giving them access to text messages and emails going back for months and years respectively. The search of Green’s office at Westminster was also said to be conducted in an “aggressive” manner. One MP who spoke to the officers involved was told: “You are at a site of crime scene.”

Well, good to see another step backwards for democracy in the UK… I think we’re going to see more of this in the months and years ahead as the state gains even greater control over the population in all aspects of our lives, and can hold people at will under dangerous and poorly drafted legislation. The rights and freedoms we’ve enjoyed for the past 50 years weren’t delivered to us benignly as manner from heaven, they were fought for and won over decades, if not centuries. There has been an erosion in democratic standards in this country which has been pretty alarming, but have gone under the radar as people keep their attention on reality tv/working longer hours and shopping for drivel they don’t need. Sadly, if this continues, the rights we enjoy now will disappear and we’ll be fighting the same battles our brothers and sisters fought before us.