Earlier this month, a Londoner was fined £80 (about $150) by the Metropolitan Police for using a swear word in private conversation with his friend. The law that was broken was one about swearing in public, a low most Britons would be surprised to know even existed. Perhaps more germane to the incident was the subject of the conversation rather than the law. The offending swear word was used, apparently within earshot of the police, to describe a piece of anti-terrorism hardware being used on a railway station in north London.
The story was initially retold by the companion of the man fine on the Londonist web site. Whilst leaving the railway station, passengers were being herded through new metal detectors, meant to help the police find things like guns and knives. On their way to a music concert, one of the two friends mentioned to his companion that the metal detector was a “piece of shit that wouldn’t stop anyone”. Whether or not this is true, the man was very surprised when six police officers forced him away from the gangway and into a corner of the train station, where the questioned him for 20 minutes and eventually fined him the £80, ostensibly for anti-social behaviour (of which more later).
Unfortunately for the police, not only were there lots of witnesses, but one of them was a reporter for the local newspaper. The result has been that while this might simply otherwise have been lost amid the daily banality of life in London, this story has instead snowballed, and become a focus for many of the worried Britons have about the direction that Tony Blair is taking the country.
Now, swearing on Britain’s railways is not unusual. Anyone who has travelled on them will be aware of how frustrating delays, overcrowding, and high ticket prices can be. The upshot is more than a little use of archaic Anglo-Saxon verbiage. Hitherto, while unpleasant, such language has not normally incurred the wrath of the state.
What’s changed are two things: the anxiety of terrorism, and the appearance of legal devices called ASBOs. An ASBO, or anti-social behaviour order, is a civil law (rather than criminal law) order that can be placed against a person to prevent then perpetrating any behaviours likely to be deemed threatening or distressing. If this all sounds rather vague, well, it is. Back in 1998, when the law creating ASBOs was passed, the hope was that they could be used to limit relatively minor crimes, particularly those carried out by juvenile and teenage offenders. Crimes such as petty theft, abuse towards neighbours, and vadalism all exist on the statute books, but the police and courts were rarely able to prosecute these crimes individually. By using ASBOs, individuals with persistently bad behaviour could be marked out and warned, with their various infractions taken as a sum. Breaching the terms of the ASBO will lead not a civil case but a criminal one, with consequently more dire consequences.
Over the years, though, ASBOs have been steadily beefed-up, in particular sporting fixed-fine penalities and anything up to a 5 year prison sentence for breaking the terms of one. What is more alarming is that in some cases, as seemingly with the case of swearing on the railways described above, ASBOs have been used as cheap-and-cheerful punative actions by the state against civilians.
Anyone against whom an ASBO is placed can of course appeal, and if breach of one leads to criminal prosecution, then the state needs to meet criminal rather than civil standards of evidence when makings its case. This, at least, is comforting.
But what remains worrying the death, albeit by inches, of civil liberties and freedom of speech characteristic of the UK, US, and indeed many other countries engaged in the War on Terror. Prime Minister Blair has certainly taken his cue from President Bush, in allowing anxiety of terrorist attacks to focus public attention in a very specific direction, away from the fundamental changes being made to the legal process. Laws created for one purpose are being used for another.
For example, anti-harassment laws drafted in 1997 have been used to limit protests that would otherwise be considered mere free speech. A woman was prosecuted as a “stalker” for sending two (yes, two) e-mails to a pharmaceutical company asking them not to engage a company that tests on animals. The 2000 Anti-terrorism Act gives the police the right to search anyone, anywhere, for any reason they want, and ASBOs give them a tool for punishing anyone who protests or otherwise reacts to their searches is anything other than a totally cooperative way. Even if you don’t like these laws, you can’t even go down to Parliament and make your case. Laws passed in 2005 for combating organised crime have now been used to prevent peaceful demonstrations within a 1000 m radius of the Houses of Parliament.
That Tony Blair is leader of the Labour Party, ostensibly a left-of-centre party with its roots in trades unions and socialism, makes this even more alarming. Given the versatility of things like ASBOs and anti-terrorism law, can we expect the removal of the right to jury trials for complex fraud trials to be used on other types of cases as well? It’s an ugly precedent, at the very least. The suspension of habeas corpus — the right of a prisoner to hear and protest his incarceration — may be explicitly defined and limited in the United States Consititution, but in the UK, with its unwritten constitution, it has always been taken as read. Anti-terrorism legislation threatens that though, by allowing individuals suspected of being terrorists to be held for up to 90 days without charge.
There’s no question we live in a dangerous world, or that the police have a difficult job. Terrorists are obviously a threat, and they clearly do not respect the law, so why should the law respect them? Shoudldn’t the state do what it can to keep its citizens safe?
Ultimately, though, what matters is not catching bombers or hijackers, but that we preserve our freedoms and the machinery of liberal democracy. The threat isn’t to people, or buildings, or aeroplanes, but to our way of life. Ironically, it is the overwhelming power of the state over its citizens that poses the greatest threat to that.
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