Last week's official announcement
that, in 1990, 539 warrants to tap telephones were authorised by the Home
Secretary and the Scottish Secretary sounded very reassuring. It gave the
impression that there is only one tapped telephone for every 100,000 people hi
Britain. Given the prevalence of crime and terrorism, we are supposed to
conclude that the extent of telephone-tapping could not possibly concern anyone
but a confirmed paranoiac.
Unfortunately, the official figure is absolutely meaningless.
Only one warrant is required to cover an entire organisation. According to
insiders in British Telecom, the number and deployment of telephone engineers
and support staff employed on tapping are consistent with many more lines – possibly
as many as 35,000 – being snooped upon by the state.
If anything like accurate, these estimates are cause for serious
concern. They indicate that the state has an unprecedented and frightening
capacity for engaging in surveillance of the population. Perhaps we are not yet
staring 1984 in the face, but
the right to privacy is being systematically undermined.
Labour is committed to bringing telephone-tapping under tighter
control, but a Labour government will have a hard time putting the party's
commitments into practice against the resistance of state surveillance and
security bureaucracies. As became clear last week, police planners are already
meeting in secret to work out how they will obstruct or circumvent a Labour
government's attempts to carry out policies they do not like, among them the
proposed restrictions on telephone-tapping. If Labour is serious about even
modest reductions in the size and influence of the surveillance state, let
alone about making what remains democratically accountable, it will have to be
well prepared for a very tough battle.
What's wrong with federalism?
It is always pleasant to see
Tories at each other's throats, and it is quite understandable that Labour is
for the moment sitting back and laughing as they tear one another to bits over
Europe.
In the longer term, however, the Tories' current row raises a crucial
question that Labour cannot duck. Giving the vague impression to the voters
that Labour is now the pro-European party is all very well, but before many
months are out, Labour will have to decide whether it is in principle in favour of the
eventual creation of a federal united states of Europe.
Largely because it knows what damage splits on Europe can cause to
British political parties, Labour has concentrated on more immediate, everyday
matters of European Community politics – the Social Charter, regional policy,
making the Commission more democratically accountable, ensuring that a
European Central Bank is supervised by elected politicians, reforming the
Common Agricultural Policy and so on. If Labour believes Britain is in the EC
to stay and if it endorses, with whatever conditions, European Monetary Union
and a European central bank, it makes sense for it explicitly to embrace the
idea of giving directly democratically accountable all-European institutions
the primary responsibility for European government within 20 years.
