A few days before the British government pushed through "the most repressive legislation since 1945", a look at the very strange coalition of opposition

Written 14 October, 1994

In Britain, only the fringes favour freedom

Ermine-clad members of Britain's House of Lords would seem to have little in common with the rainbow-clad peacocks of its rave- music youth culture -- apart from their very Britishness and exotic appearance. They form, though, a de facto alliance in defence of the British Constitution, famous mostly for not being worth the paper it's not written on.

While the mainstream of society and politics have looked on in bemusement, its outer fringes in all directions -- from landed Lords to homeless squatters -- have, in their various dialects of protest, spoken out for liberty.

If you follow British affairs you might have caught a routine snippet about clashes after a peaceful demonstration by around 30,000 in London Sunday October 9. You probably will not have heard about sections of the police opposing parts of the government plans. Neither will Members of Parliament, with Conservatives following their leader and most of Labour abstaining for fear of seeming "soft on crime".

The problem is much easier to explain to readers of this newspaper than it is, for example, to those of the London Times. The government plans, simply, to take away Britons' Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves.

To explain at the length required for a British audience, lacking the language of liberty which is Americans' heritage: The Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill (CJB) will, it is expected, be pushed through Parliament on October 19. One of its dozens of provisions allows the courts to "draw inferences" from an accused's silence when arrested.

This will not be much of a problem for sophisticated criminals. It will be a problem for future Birmingham Sixes and Guildford Fours, wrongly convicted of terrorist offences and released only years later when the Appeal Court found that their "confessions" were falsified. It will be a very serious problem indeed for the highly suggestible and educationally subnormal who are the victims of less-publicized miscarriages of justice.

As you might expect from bizarre Britain, which needs its odd sense of humor, there's an irony here. Several of the police officers who were alleged to have falsified those confessions were acquitted after -- you guessed? -- exercising their right to silence on the charges against them.

Andrew Puddephat, director of Britain's National Council for Civil Liberties, describes the CJB as "a rag-bag of prejudices" -- as if the Conservatives had gone to their suburban supporters and asked "who do you hate?" When the coal-miners were striking in 1985, Margaret Thatcher referred to an "enemy within". This government is defining scads of them, playing to the gallery of its supporters' prejudices. Pastor Niemoller's famous warning is unavoidable.

In a cramped country where a Site of Outstanding Natural Beauty may be scarcely larger than a city block, a vigorous and colorful protest movement opposes highway schemes which obliterate thousands of years of landscape history with one stroke of an engineer's pen. Having been through the formal processes of opposition and been ignored, the archetypal Conservative Party voters "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells" often now find themselves in alliance with second-generation hippies, physically obstructing the earth-moving machines by dancing all over them.

So the CJB creates new offences of "aggravated trespass", specifically to outlaw such acts of non-violent civil disobedience. These were drafted, it is said, with the help of the fox-hunting lobby, well-represented in the Conservative Party. And so the anti-roads protestors and the hunt saboteurs become a colorful part of the opposition to the CJB.

Over past summers some of the most vibrant cultural events in the Sceptred Isle have been "raves" -- outdoor gatherings with techno music. (Novelist Will Self suggests that Britain's only worthwhile export is underground youth culture: this, now, is it.) Having danced their feet off for a weekend, participants believe that, contrary to Margaret Thatcher's dictum that "there is no such thing as society", they are re-inventing a genuine sense of community. Occasionally they thoughtlessly annoy the neighbors: always they produce a knee-jerk reaction to young people coming together in large numbers to do everything which is un-Conservative.

So the CJB creates specific offences to outlaw raves. The law being the ass it is, it must now include a definition of music, which "includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats." Police will be able to order anyone to turn back on suspicion that they might be heading for a party or a protest. How this can be squared with international law guaranteeing freedom of movement and assembly is unclear.

For at least half a century large numbers of British people, unable to find housing, have squatted. Despite the odd scary story of a nice middle-class home being occupied while the occupants ski, the majority of squatted houses has always been -- the squatters insist -- those left empty by inefficient and/or cash-strapped local government. But, converging with rave culture, squatters have recently become more visible and more disturbing to the sensibilities of Tory activists.

So the CJB will allow court orders to remove certain squatters without them being represented or forewarned. Anyone failing to comply with such an order within 24 hours may be arrested. As far as defense attorneys can tell, if an order is issued in error -- say, at the behest of an unscrupulous private landlord -- the victims must leave their home and stay out until an appeal is heard months hence. Mick Bennett of the Metropolitan Police Federation, the nearest London's police constables are allowed to a trade union, "would have a problem with getting involved with someone who has taken over an empty building."

There's much more. Privatized quasi-jails for 12-to-14-year-old offenders: legislative resistance to making these mandatory was improbably spearheaded by the Conservative Baroness Firth. Yet more law against being a Gypsy: the House of Lords toned that down too. The government has vowed to reverse these small defeats. There are unexceptionable sections. The lowering of the age of consent for homosexual men to 18, and controls on embryo research, are rolled up in this Bill.

No-one can argue with measures against child pornography. The CJB introduces probably the world's first "virtual reality offence" concerning "pseudo-photographs" which, if real, would be child pornography. No-one can argue with measures against terrorists, can they? The new offences of possessing information "likely to be useful to terrorists," will, though, surely tempt the authorities when journalist investigate, say, alleged collusion between the security forces and Loyalist terrorists in Northern Ireland. And in both these cases the defence has to prove innocence of intent.

The Labour Party has, in its enthusiasm to be "tough on crime", placed itself squarely in the great excluded middle of this argument. At last week's Party Conference, just one mention of the CJB made it onto the carefully-managed agenda, committing the party to reverse only the anti-gypsy section.

Even at the Conservative Party conference last week the CJB was barely debated, beyond delegates alternately blaming the Lords and the anarchists for delays.

We have to look the fringes for any response. Alasdair Palmer, home affairs editor of the often Right-of-sensible weekly the Spectator, concludes that "it is bizarre that the CJB has literally dozens of paragraphs dedicated to helping the police arrest people who like dancing and going to outdoor parties, but not one single sentence which will enable them to close the loophole which [by revealing informants' identities] leads to the release of violent and dangerous criminals..."

Lord Justice Hoffman, in a trial of anti-roads protestors, commented that "Civil disobedience on the grounds of conscience is an honourable tradition in this country and those who take part in it may in he end be vindicated by history." Indeed they may be, as a mere passing acquaintance with the history of the United States will tell you.

This version is © copyright 1996 Mike Holderness; moral rights are asserted.