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A
Well, I'm sorry, we're. We're five minutes late. I know, I know. And I think you've all made an amazing effort to come here in the middle of exams, so congratulations to you all. I hope there'll be some nuggets. You're quite a rowdy audience tonight. A rowdy audience. This befits our panel the State of Freedom in lse. This is me. I'm the chair and I'm here. This evening is about our two extraordinarily distinguished guests, Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty. And here is Hot News. Here is Hot News coming out quite soon at a very accessible price, published by how much?
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B
1899.
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A
Correction. At a moderately accessible. Published by Penguin. Show me. Chocoboty on Liberty. Yes, we do know it evokes memories of a certain obscure white male. Monty Century.
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B
Really?
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A
Show me. If the search has been done by others. No, it looks. We've seen a bit of it on Amazon and you can buy it. It's fantastic.
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C
So that's Rob.
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A
So Director of Liberty and prospective author. But mainly, of course, we're interested in charming on the State of Freedom. But first off is a colleague extraordinarily distinguished. It's a fantastic thing to have Nikki Lacey back in lse. She took a brief. It's almost like a sabbatical, almost like a sabbatical in Oxford University. But she's back with us now as LSE School professor of Law, Gender and Social Policy. And the format of the evening is, first of all, that Nikki will speak for 15, 20 minutes plus. And then we have Shami for around the same, perhaps less. And the beauty of this extremely broad title, quite deliberately and consciously chosen, is that they can range as they wish. And then we have interactions with you all. And also via Twitter. We now know that our audiences do this a lot and we already have some questions. And if you want to ask a question during this, the hashtag is right in front of you.
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B
There.
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Lsefreedom.
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B
We have.
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A
And he'll be revealed later. We have a Twitter guru in the room and that's why there's a fourth chair, because at the relevant moment, the Twitter guru will reveal himself fully clothed. He's looking disappointed not to leave and he will feed some questions from Twitter into the discussion. We end just before 8, if not well before. Depends how the evening goes. We won't keep ourselves here artificially. And there is remarkably, and quite surprisingly and much to my pleasure, a drinks reception. And also, excitingly, we have anticipated quite a number of people at the drinks reception. It's not my normal drinks reception where we, we order wine for 10 people and 400 people turn up. This is a drinks reception which will have drinks. So it's a rare bonus of delicie and that'll be directly outside and that'll be your reward. But before I ramble on to the point where there is no evening, Nikki.
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B
Lacey.
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D
Thank you so much, Connor. It was just a delight to be invited to contribute tonight and share that the platform is shammy. I'm a bit fed up with Conor though, because he's already stolen my first joke unwittingly. So I was about to start by thanking him for giving us such a well focused topic. So anyway, I've taken the brief as I think it was intended, which was to allow me to do what I talk about, what I really like to talk about. And since I'm a criminal lawyer, I am going to talk about what's been happening in criminal law, criminal justice more generally, but from very much the point of view of its implications for the state of freedom. And of course criminalization and punishment are among the most freedom threatening tools in the panoply of the power of modern states, but they also have a role in protecting the freedom of members of society insofar as they prescribe behavior which is itself liberty threatening or otherwise harmful. So criminal law sort of create raises some really key political and moral questions about how states should strike a balance between both the liberty interests of different groups within society and of course, as we've much debated in the years since 2001 between Liberty and security. And I'll come back to that. So I'm going to focus on two arguments that have been sort of really around, not just in academic journals, but I think so somewhat in the newspapers and magazines over the last few years. And those are these. First of all, the argument that the scope of criminalization, the scope of both the criminal law and its enforcement as a tool of governance in countries like this one has been increasing with direct and negative implications for, as it were, the state of freedom. And especially I would say, and this is a theme I'm going to keep coming back to, to the distribution of freedom among different social groups. Secondly, the associated but slightly different argument that the nature and quality of this criminalization has been changing in subtle but quite important ways with less obvious but equally worrying implications. So I'll start by setting out those two arguments and then I will look at some of the questions about how we assess whether they're right, how we could prove Them, as it were. And then I'm going to go on and look at some possible explanations of why they're happening to the extent that we know they are happening, and then leaving myself a very brief amount of time for by far the most difficult question, but a very important one, how they might best be reversed or at least slowed down. So let's start just with the question of whether criminalization scope is increasing. Are we criminalizing more? And I'm just focusing here really on the boundaries of criminal law and its enforcement. I'm not going to talk specifically about police powers, although clearly to the extent that the criminal law is broadening its scope, that implies greater discretionary power for the police, for the prosecution. And that in itself raises huge issues. Accountability of proper controls, some of them human rights questions, which I imagine Shami may advert to. So I want to acknowledge that that's really important. But for the sake of having a reasonably clear focus, I'm going to confine myself to criminalization. So the first and most obvious question is how do we assess it? How could we tell whether the criminal law is growing if there is more criminalization? And the most obvious place to look is in legisl, is there more criminal legislation than there used to be? Now, I think ostensibly here we do see a hugely changed landscape. I studied criminal law about 35 years ago down the road at UCL and so I think I started my criminal law course in about 1978. We were still thinking that Theft Act 1968 was pretty significant and recent and up to the mark. The Sexual Offences Act 1976 was cutting edge stuff and there was a bit of controversy about the criminal Law Act 1977 and that was about it. But today, and we would have great debates about why it was so difficult to get proper rationalizing legislation for criminal law, with the response usually being, well, it's incredibly hard to get parliamentary time for criminal law reform matters. Not anymore. The world has absolutely changed. I did a very quick review of the some of the major pieces of criminal legislation over the last 20 years. I'm not going to read out all the titles because there are 28 major pieces of criminal legislation, significantly seven of them, so a quarter of them are terrorism legislation. But that still leaves 21 major pieces of criminal law reform. Things like Criminal justice and Public Order Act, Terrorism act of various kinds, criminal Justice Act 2004, 2003, Crime and Security act, significant title 2010. Thought we might get a little bit of a lull when the government changed, but not for long. We had then the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act, 2011, amendments to domestic Violence, Crime and Victims act, and most recently, and I'll have a bit more to say about this, the Antisocial Behavior Crime and policing act of 2014.
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Now.
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D
That in itself shows us that criminalisation now occupies a very prominent place on the parliamentary agenda. But of course, that in itself doesn't tell us all that much, because these statutes are a very different length. Not all of their provisions enact criminal offences. Some of the offences they do enact replace older offences. And of course, criminal offences are quite often created not by statutes like these, but by other more general statutes. So, for example, the Children act of 2004, the Education act of 2005, the Financial Services and Markets act of 2000, and for a little bit of light relief, the Fireworks act of 2003, all create, among other things, criminal offences. And even that isn't the end of it, because many more regulatory criminal offences are created by regulatory legislation, by secondary delegated legislation. In other words, you get a statute that sets up powers for ministers, for example, to then create regulatory offences. They don't show up in the primary statute, so it's actually very hard to track them. So it's no good just looking at the legislation that has the word crime or criminal justice or something like that in its title. We've got to try and in some sense count the number of offences. And that sounds like a very simple thing to do, but let me just tell you, it's not. It's harder than you might think, for all sorts of reasons, some of which we can discuss. But here are some estimates. You'll see how widely they differ. If you were to just Google this question, probably the first place you would get taken would be the Legal Services Commission's list of criminal offences. And that looks actually quite manageable. There are about 300 on its list, and they're mainly in what would normally be seen as the kind of core areas of criminal law violence, property offences, terrorism, illegal drugs, sexual offences, offences against public order and public justice. But really, that is the tip of the iceberg. In 1980, a committee of the Group justice estimated that on conducting a search, they found over 7,200 criminal offences. By March 2001, just four years later, David Ormerod, in a leading criminal law textbook, estimated that there were more than 10,000. And thanks to our LSE colleague Jeremy Horder, professor of Criminal law here, who was then at the Law Commission, the Law Commission launched a very careful consultation paper in 2010 and estimated then that since 1997 more than 3,000 criminal offences had come, new criminal offences had come onto the statute book. And I think very helpfully, they also tried to give us some kind of longer term perspective on this. You know, is this really accelerating? And if it is accelerating, when did it start? We need to know that. And what they did was they looked at the volumes of Halsbury's Laws of England, which are the last word on statutes enforce. Volume one of Halsbury covers the 637 years between 1351 and 1988, and it's 1382 pages long. Volumes two, three and four cover the offences created in just the 19 years between 1998 and 2008. They're 3746 pages long. So more than two and a half times as many pages of Hawsbury were needed to cover those 19 years as were needed for the previous 637. And the law Commission in that piece of work further estimated that about 3,000 pieces of that secondary delegated legislation that I mentioned are passed each year, many of those also creating criminal offences. And they give an example of an offence created under the Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies Number 2Amendment Regulations 2008 by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural affairs, which created 103 criminal offences aimed at reducing the risk posed by the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, otherwise known as mad cow disease. So, in short, we can be pretty sure that what we might call formal criminalization, in other words, that the technical boundaries of the criminal law have been increasing very fast over the last 25 or 30 years. But even that, of course, only tells us quite a small amount, because it doesn't tell us how many of these offences are being enforced. It doesn't tell us how many of them don't make that much difference because they overlap with pre existing offences. It doesn't tell us how many are ineffective, because the law courts just don't really have the specialist information to advise them that was to enforce them. That was a point made very strongly by our colleague Julia Black, who advised the Law Commission on those delegated offences in specialist regulatory areas like financial services. It also doesn't tell us anything about how these offences are being interpreted. So we really need to know a lot more about what we might call the law in action here. Now, we do know, of course, the total numbers of people prosecuted and indeed convicted over time. And what we can say from that is that the numbers prosecuted and convicted have not gone up constantly with the increase in the number of criminal offences. But even that doesn't tell us all that much, because it doesn't tell us about the enormous discretionary power that this great miasma of formal criminal law has given to prosecuting authorities, which may use that discretionary power as a kind of negotiating power or even a sort of blackmailing power, rather than a formal enforcement power. And we're not just talking here about the police or prosecutors. We're now talking, and I'll say a bit more about this in a minute, about a whole range of enforcement, enforcement agencies, not just regulatory agencies within or underneath ministries, but also local authorities, very importantly, even housing associations and so on. And that really brings me to my second main question, which is these purported changes in the sort of quality, the kind of criminalization that we're seeing. And here I'd like to just mention four things that have been much discussed among criminal law colleagues, which I think are important and significant and ought to be reaching a broader audience. The first is that a great deal of recent criminalization has been pushing back the boundaries, the temporal boundaries, at which criminal liability kicks in ever further from a completed offence. So, to give you an example, it's an offence to cause somebody's death with intention. It's also always been, or long been, an offence to attempt to do so. But what's now happening, and it happened earliest probably in the sphere of terrorism legislation, is that we're getting offences which are much more remote from that ultimate, obviously, criminal act. Things like. I mean, a good example, I think, would be an offence under section for of the Terrorism act of 2006. A person commits an offence if, with the intention of committing acts of terrorism or assisting another to commit such acts, he engages in any conduct in preparation for giving effect to his intention. So that really means that you could be already guilty of an offence under this section for. Well, it's really hard to know how far back in time that liability would go. There's another really good example, actually, in today's headlines. I don't know how many of you saw this, but Teresa May is in the headlines once again about yet another of those pieces of legislation. I was talking to you about the new Serious Crime Bill, about to feature strongly in the Queen's speech. Tomorrow, is it tomorrow? Which is, you know, it's a really nice headline for the Home Secretary. We're going to do more about organising crime. None of us agree with organized crime, so it's a very popular message. Organised crime groups use a range of associates. The Home Secretary said, both professional and non professional to help them, for example by writing contracts, renting warehouse space or delivering packages. And what they're going to do is actually in effect here massively, as far as I can see, broaden out the scope of criminal liability beyond the existing already quite wide provisions for aiding and abetting as a secondary party criminal offences. So that moving back of the temporal boundaries is a very important development. Second important development which I think you'll all know about is the creation of these hybrid forms of criminal civil liability, of which which the most famous is the antisocial behavior order. Effectively what happens here is that something typically a local authority will apply for something that looks a bit like an injunction, an antisocial behaviour order, you apply for it only on a civil standard of proof. But when somebody breaches the order, they're guilty of what amounts to a criminal offence with really quite potentially severe sanctions. Closely related to those hybrid forms of criminal civil regulation, we have what I think I would call sort of de facto criminalization in areas that aren't really part of formal criminal law. And I think the obvious example here would be immigration. We are seeing the sort of de facto criminalization of many migrants. And I think fourthly this sort of amounts to, and again terrorism is the most obvious but not the only case to almost a sort of recreation of an older kind of status based or group based, group membership based form of criminalization in which the whole idea of criminalization is in some way tied up with the idea of being a bad character. Now these, these two features, these features of criminal law aren't absolutely new, but I think their scope is new and they really have changed the balance of power both as between the state and citizens, between state including prosecuting authorities and ordinary citizens, but also I think between different groups of citizens. And that's why I want to talk here not just about a curtailment of, of freedom, but a sort of redistribution of freedom within the policy. And let me just take one very brief case study before I move on to the final points I want to make, which is the Antisocial Behavior Crime and Policing act, the most recent large piece of criminal legislation enacted this year very recently. Please don't ask me any detailed questions about it. Here's why. It covers two hundred and forty six pages. It boasts 186 sections plus 11 schedules. The first one hundred and twenty two sections are centrally in the area of criminal law. They include a rag bag of things, dangerous dogs, firearms, forced marriage. But the really striking feature of the act is that it also significantly pushes outwards the terrain of these hybrid orders and sort of de facto criminalization. There's an absolute panoply of new preventive orders in this legislation. A few of criminal behaviour orders, public spaces protection orders, consumption of alcohol in breach of prohibition orders, orders restricting public right over the highway, forced marriage protection orders, community protection notices, it goes on and on. Now, two main things about this legislation. First of all, the remedial structure, you know, what happens if you breach one of these orders is quite distinctive in that it includes, includes a lot of provisions for things like confiscation of property or exclusion from property, which might mean your home and it might mean where you actually live if you're homeless. And I think there is a real issue about what some of the social knock on effects of some of these sanctions will be. But perhaps even more obviously what's distinctive here and very much a feature of these hybrid civil criminal orders is the distinctiveness of the range of enforcement authorities who are getting involved in effect in criminalization. Key among them local authorities, but other authorities who have responsibilities in relation to land. Now there's obviously a sort of agenda, broader political agenda here which has to do with, well, we used to call it active citizenship. And beginning of this administration, it was known as the big society. There's a lot about communities getting together and negotiating with the local authority which has to produce a community remedy document. It has to. The police have to have an obligation to consult with community representatives, which I looked at the small print on this and that seems to be whoever the police think represent the community. Now I'm actually working at the moment. My own research is in part on what the impact of the very great degree of local power in the United States is on criminal justice. And the US has much greater delegation of local power to elected authorities, of criminal justice power to elected authorities at the local level than we have here or I think will ever have. Now, it sounds democratic to get this power down to the local level, to get citizens and community representatives involved. But here's the question and we should be asking who will involve themselves and what will their interests be? Will these be things that will be for the general public interest, which is what the criminal law is meant to be about, or will it be about, you know, the more privileged people who want to not have people drinking in their parks perfectly reasonably, but nonetheless, you know, there are some people who don't have many options about where they hang out. So I think we really have to ask whether these things, what's the pattern of enforcement here, who's going to be on the receiving end of all these new preventive orders? And I think that my worry is that they will really contribute to kind of polarising dynamics. And that's why I emphasize the question of the distribution of freedom. Okay, I want to just make my last two points very briefly. So why is it happening? Why it seems as though this is happening? Why is it happening? Three arguments are out there. One is that as governments have become less autonomous in relation to the economy, as the economy globalizes, they tend to go for. For criminal law, criminal justice, as a kind of nice, strong policy area. It doesn't require them to create any new infrastructure and it makes them look tough. Secondly, my colleague here, Peter Ramsey, has argued that New labor was sort of very clever and inventive in that they fixed on the widespread feelings of insecurity and vulnerability that come with our sort of late modern world and produced policies like the ASBO2 and other policies in the criminal law area to proscribe conduct which fails adequately to reassure fellow citizens in a world in which fear of crime and a more general sense of insecurity is widespread. And then finally, there's an argument which I, with others have been developing, which is, I think, really one that focuses on the link between these developments and growing inequality. So my thought is that we might explain both the scope of that insecurity on which Peter Ramsey focuses and the popularity, particularly among swing voters, floating voters in the middle of the spectrum of these policies, like the asbo, of really, in my view, very unfortunate policies on the curtailment of migrants rights. And that in a way, this growing social and economic inequality is eroding the degree to which we see ourselves as sharing a common fate and therefore producing these kinds of polarizing logics, which in my view are reflected in these delegations of power to the local level. So I think the underlying question here is about social inequality and social polarization and the idea that some groups are not going to have, because of that, full access to their freedoms. Well, I haven't left myself much time for solutions. You know, there is nothing general to be said about this. There are some areas that are easier to fix than others. I mean, the explosion of regulatory offences has been to some extent turned back by some very sensible law commission proposals about building in kind of gateways within departments, so that departments had to come up with, with fairly structured reasons if they really wanted to make a criminal offence rather than just a civil provision, turning back the sort of creeping growth of criminalization more generally. Though I think is going to be much harder. Of course, human rights challenges, and I imagine Shami will be talking about these are a key tool in that effort. As I think, and I want to emphasize this will be much more social research on the implementation and impact of these newly enacted laws. I think we really need good research on who's using them, who they're being enforced against, and their broader social impact. At root, I suppose I believe that there are some very deep political and social dynamics here which we're going to have to tackle not just in terms of changes in criminal behavior, justice policy, or criminal law, but in turn the social and economic policy. So just to sum up, I see there as being three sort of real components to be addressed here in relation to these developments in criminalization and in freedom. First of all, the increase in this formal and actual criminalizing power vis a vis citizenship generally, clearly prima facie implies a decline in freedom for the citizen vis a vis the state that has been justified. Secondly, through the compensating promise of the, as it were, freedom enhancing potential of a fairly implemented and effective criminal law, we really need to know how widespread that implementation is and its impact. And if the truth is that it's not really making much difference to the problems that cause the insecurities that caused the popularity of these policies in the first place, then we need to know that, and that seems to me very important. And thirdly, of course, if they are ineffective and there is no compensatory enhancement of freedom, we further also need to know how that encroachment on freedom is distributed across social groups. Thank you very much.
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A
Great, thanks. Nick sharp.
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B
Well, it's lovely to be back at the LSE where I was a student, but it's a slightly daunting privilege you can imagine, to follow Nicky. Nicky and Connor aren't just the cleverest lawyers that I've known. They're actually the most articulate in that they speak plain English. Which is. Which is. It's not a universal. It's not a universal gift in the profession or even in the academy, I have to say, you know, we can attack the political class and we're sort of part of it, we're sort of semi detached from it. But sometimes, my fellow lawyers, I'm a lawyer in recovery, by the way, because I'm sort of activist these days. Or perhaps you never recover. Perhaps I'm in remission. And the way to do that, I guess, is one drinks reception at a time. But you know what I mean. I mean, you know, legal aid's practically decimated. We've lost all these battles on various due process issues and so on. And some of our. Of our friends and colleagues have been up on the Today program time and again. And you know you never use a word of English. I know 25 of Latin would do and it hasn't always helped. And Connor and Nicky are fantastic exceptions to that. And you know they speak human which all the politicians don't do either. I was going to. I had some thoughts about how to deal with this fantastically broad topic which is what we like as activists. We like to come and just say whatever's on our mind that day. But I think that, that Nicky's speech is so important it deserves a little response before I kind of make a few points of my own. I do think that one lens through which to look at the whole state of freedom or its demise over the last decade is the lens of criminalization. No question. I want to just say that I completely from a more practitioner point of view and if you don't know much about me, I. Very early in my career I was a government lawyer. Perhaps the most formative moment in my career was kind of six odd years between 96 and 911 in the home Office working on lots of crap laws really for governments of both persuasions I want to add. And so I completely recognise the. The trajectory that Nicky has charted so expertly. And yes, I think you can look at the whole demise of freedom and there has been on balance of demise more than on balancer demise through the lens of criminalization. That's too many criminal offences, that is preemptive criminal offences and the bastardisation of due process and that's by the kind of. The kind of mutant. Mutant hybrids like anti social behaviour orders and everything that came from that. Because you develop a wonderful little mechanism like an anti social behaviour order and that ends up as a control order and then as a T pin. Right. So it starts off in wonderful new labor progression. Thinking back, you know, before things could only get better, you know, before. Before you know, 1997 and the People's palace and all of that. And wouldn't it be great if we could. We could have a lovely sort of civil injunctive type thing that would. That would give people a sort of warning and they wouldn't have to go to. They wouldn't have to go to prison, they wouldn't have to be criminalized initially. They just get this kind of ASBO thingy and you'd get it on a lower balance of proof and you'd get it for behavior that was kind of nuisance or kind of impolite or kind of, you know, and we wouldn't have to define it too carefully. And. But then you'd get a kind of injunctive type warning and. But of course, you muck about with the due process and it becomes not a warning. It becomes a shortcut into criminalization. And I'm trying not to be cynical here. There may have been been some very progressive people back in 96 and 97 who thought it would be a way out of the system. And actually it became a shortcut into criminalization and into custody. So, yes, you had the mutant hybrid of blurring the civil and criminal law that Nicky's described so adeptly, but you then also, you know, even civil law was too. Was too challenging for the sausage machine. That was Mr. Blair's idea of due process. And so we'll go for the. We'll go for administrative law. And that's where. That's how you ended up with things like Belmarsh and secret courts and so on. So even the civil law was too exacting for this. For this. We know who the bad guys are. That's not a paraphrase. That's a direct quote from Tony Blair. We know who the bad guys are. We don't need due process. We don't need the 19th century criminal justice system where too many. That's concerned with too many of the innocent being convicted. We're concerned. But, you know, turn Blackstone on his head. These are direct quotes from Mr. Blair. These are not cheeky paraphrases from me. So you do we blur the civil and criminal law, and then when the. That's too exacting. We go for immigration law and we go for secret courts and due processes now, not even process at all. It is quasi courts and secret courts, and that's where it goes on process. So I completely agree with what Nicky said. Too much criminality in terms of substantive criminal offences, too much preemption in terms of thought crime before you even do the deed and muck about with due process so that you can just, you know, sweep people into the system, because we know who the bad guys are. So seeing as that she's done such a fantastic job and what's left for me? Well, I think I'll look at it through another. I'll look at the same problem in the same landscape and perhaps the same period of time through another lens, and that's the lens of universality, which he's kind of touched on. And Actually, in Connor's fantastic book, which I don't. As, you know, I'm in recovery or remission, so I don't read so many law books these days. And, you know, I just. It's all sound bites with me. I always say to my colleagues at Liberty, when the. When the bad guys do it, it's spin. When we do it, it's Defense against the Dark Arts. So it's, you know, and so sound bites are the sort of modern, sort of political haiku, the sort of great political poetry. But we're talking about, you know, we're talking about putting an idea in. In a sentence or two. And so even Connor's very, very pithy book, which is called Liberty and Security, which I really think you should all read if you haven't. It's really quite. What is it? A bit more than 100 pages, but.
- [39:30]
A
God, I hope so. I think a bit more.
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B
But, you know, the communist manifestation and a lot of Scott Fitzgerald and, you know, lots of. Lots of great. Lots of great. Lots of great works are short. You really ought to read Connor's book Liberty and Security because it's kind of about the rule of law and democracy and it's kind of about the domestic and the global. And it's the same issues, but put into a pace 911 context, but also a context that's way older than 911 that goes right back to our idea of what the state should be and what the relationship between the state and the people should be. And some people's instinctive, authoritarian idea of the state is the great Leviathan, as opposed to an idea of it being a political community that could be broadened so that we all have a stake in it, not just in this country, but all over the world. So it's relevant to. To the lens that I want to look through at this problem of the demise of freedom in our country, and that is the question of universality. Because in my experience of doing this job now for nearly 11 years, despite all the hysterical headlines and political rhetoric, people do actually love human rights. Their own. Seriously, they do. My speech right now, at least for a few more minutes, is free and yours is a little more expensive.
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D
Right?
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B
We love our own rights and freedoms and those of people like us. Right. You know, your kids should have the asbo. My kids should have the extra cello lessons and maths tuition. Right. Even when politics, you know, occasionally politicians, kids go off the rails and there are nasty little stories in newspapers. You know what I'm talking about?
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F
Because.
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B
Because the custody sergeant has has phoned up a tabloid newspaper and some of the same politicians that were wagging their forefingers, by the way they wagged their forefingers with this hand, the other hand was doing the expenses. But we won't go there. Universality. But you know, everybody's kids are kids. It's just that when you're in a council estate it's called antisocial behaviour and when you're in an Oxbridge college, it called the Bullingdon Club. I'm sort of teasing, but not really. So I'm going to look at the same sort of proposition of the demise of freedom, but through the lens of universality as being the opposite of hypocrisy, or the opposite of my speech is free and yours is more expensive because that's another way in which freedom seeps away and you can chart it in so many ways. It's a bit like the Holocaust poem, you know, and there was nobody left to speak for me. And the most existential threat to this idea of equality or equal treatment or universality in the context of law and human rights, the existential threat to it is the threat to the Human Rights act and the threat to the Convention on Human Rights, make no mistake, that's where this is coming from. That's where this is coming from. And that is the beef that the critics of the Human Rights act and the ECHR have with it, that it protects everybody, not just me and people like me, but everybody, including foreign nationals, which is kind of the elephant in the room, let's face it, because a lot of this is connected with. With a toxic debate on immigration, which Nikki touched on just a little in her remarks. So we've got at least two parties who, if ukip, I suppose UKIP is now a serious party in terms of a serious challenge to what we're talking about here today. We've got at least two parties who are likely to go into the next general election campaign with manifesto commitments to either pull out of the Convention on Human Rights or seriously tinker with it, or reserve from it in some way and no doubt to scrap the Human Rights Act. We have Her Majesty's Opposition who we don't know how certain and sure footed or ambivalent they're going to be. There's a piece in one of the national newspapers today suggesting that there might have to be some guidance to judges to tell them to take less notice of Strasbourg jurisprudence. And that's from the Shadow Lord Chancellor who no doubt meant well. No doubt meant well. I'm very clear on the Human Rights act, the injunction on the judiciary is to take account Strasbourg jurisprudence, not remotely to be bound by it. And that is explicit in the Human Rights act. And that is the settlement. And it preserves national sovereignty and it preserves parliamentary sovereignty, as you all know, because there's no strikedown power in relation to primary legislation. End of story. Stick. Don't twist, no messing about with the Human Rights act, because the beef with the Human Rights act is it protects everybody. And so any Bill of Rights that will come in its place will not be a progressive human rights document. It will be reductive and it will be divisive. And it will not be about protecting human rights for everyone. That's my position. And if we look at some of the greatest incursions on rights and freedoms since 9 11, now we could even go further back. They generally begin as divisive. They generally begin as an attack on the rights and freedoms of one group. And then this becomes acceptable. And then either because the power is so broad that it can be used in an unexpected way, like the extradition treaty. That wasn't supposed to be About Gap Harry MacKinnon looking for UFOs on the Internet, was there? It wasn't supposed to be about Christopher Tappin in his blazer and corduroy trousers at his golf club in Orpington doing his import export business, was it? That was sold to everybody in a hurry post 911 as summary extradition for dark skinned terror suspects. And look at the surprise. Look at the surprise and the outrage. The Telegraph, the Daily Mail, fantastic campaign from the Daily Mail that helped to some extent to, you know, to keep Gary McKinnon in this country and have him dealt with here, which is completely right. And, you know, both coalition parties in opposition got behind that. Nobody should be parceled off around the globe, if you believe remotely in due process, the presumption of innocence without a basic case being shown in a local court. And when they never left the country and they sat on the Internet and everything that they did could be looked at here. Nobody should be treated that way. But let's face it, that treaty was passed because it wasn't passed with Gary McKinnon in mind. And Gary McKinnon was saved because his name was MacKinnon and not calm. Let's be absolutely blunt about this. And the coalition parties that campaigned against the extradition treaty and act and made promises in opposition did not deliver in government. And if I were to go through just for a few minutes, some of the substantive incursions into the various rights and freedoms in the convention, you can see in relation to most of them that begins with an attack on equal treatment and universality. If you sum up in lay people's terms what human rights are all about, before you get into article this and that of this or that convention, three words for me. Dignity, as in, each and every one of us is special. Just because we're alive and our lives are precious, we're entitled to dignity and autonomy. Equality as in, not as informal equality, but in terms of. Certainly in terms of equal treatment under the law and the application of the laws and fairness in the sense of some kind of due process, right, Some kind of fair hearing before terrible things happen to you. Now, bearing in mind I'm talking about civil and political rights here and not necessarily about, you know, about. About everything else. Dignity, equality and fairness. And the greatest of these is what? Equality. Equality and why? Because my speech is free and yours is a little bit more expensive. And you'd say, but Shami, equality can't be more important than say, the rule against torture. Surely not. Surely if we're talking about the most important human rights, they must be these hardcore, you know, Article two, Article three, Article four of the Convention, Right to life, right against torture, right against slavery. Well, actually, no. Because in practical political and policy and human terms, people wouldn't be tortured and people wouldn't be enslaved if it was going to happen to everybody. And as our dear and learned friend Rabinder Singh, now Sir Rabinder Singh once said here at the lse, the beauty of the principle of equal treatment. He gave a great lecture here many years ago before he was a judge, where he talked about equality as the neglect of virtue. Because the beauty of the principle of equal treatment is it forces democratic majorities to put themselves in the place of the minority whose rights they're prepared to trade away. So I'll give you an example. Well, let's go back to torture. Let's go back to torture. And for a moment in the. In freedom's name, we had this. We had all these wonderful euphemisms post 9 11, the war on terror being a fantastic euphemism in itself. But others like Extraordinary Rendition, which isn't beautiful singing, but kidnap and torture, right? And waterboarding, which isn't a sort of seaside sport that you might do if you wished you could all be California girls, right? It's actually drowning. It's not even simulated drowning. It's beginning to drown some. Now these things would not have happened if people didn't think they could just get away with it for foreigners and ditto. The worst. Moving away from hardcore torture, moved into due process rights. Move into Article 5, right against arbitrary detention, on Article 6, right to a fair trial, for example, before you're branded a terrorist. Where were the worst violations of these rights? On both sides of The Atlantic After 9 11, they were in relation to non nationals. How did clever White House lawyers get away with it? They told the President it's okay because these are enemy combatants, they're not our nationals. And we're doing it offshore. And a little torture haven. Offshore tax, sorry, torture haven called Guantanamo Bay. And that's how you get away with the worst violations of human rights and the worst abridgment of freedom or liberty by carving it up by nationality. I'm not interested in the word citizen anymore. I'm interested in the word human being. Because citizenship is, it seems to be a privilege that is given and taken away by the political community, and not even the political community, the political elite. And it happened, it happened in Nazi Germany and it happened, you know, it happens all over the world. Citizenship is given and it's taken away. And if your rights and freedoms are contingent on that, you know, I think that's incredibly, incredibly fragile indeed. Now let's go to Article 8. Let's go to, you know, the more the balanced or qualified rights and freedom. Now, privacy has been a massive issue and I ought to touch on privacy if we're talking about freedom in modern Britain, because there have been enormous challenges to the right to the right to respect your private life and your home and your correspondence as protected by Article 8 of the Convention now in the Human Rights Act. Now what have the challenges been? Well, there's obviously been this kind of post 9, 11 state of fear. There's obviously been the complacency that goes with the political sentiment and slogan, nothing to hide, nothing to fear. You know, that one right, nothing to hide, nothing to fear. And then of course there's been the amazing technological developments that have come in the last 20, 15, 10 even fewer years, and the growth of the Internet in particular, which is a wonderful thing, including for Democrats and activists and internationalists to connect with each other and communicate with each other. It's a great leveler for the activists against the Leviathan state, but it's also a real challenge to our privacy and the dignity that goes with privacy. Now, people often, even on the left, even at places like this, often think that I'm a bit silly for banging on about privacy when there are far greater human rights violations in the world. But I would just ask them to reflect on the very important relationship with privacy rights and all the other rights and freedoms in the. In the bundle. I mean, how could you. How could you have, for example, free elections without a secret ballot? How can you have a fair trial without confidential counsel? How can you have decent medical care without medical confidentiality? How can you have really have freedom of thought, conscience, and religion without a little bit of private, you know, private space? How can you have, you know, equality in the context of your most intimate life? How can you. And even though we know that, for example, speech and privacy are often in tension with, you know, kiss and tell stories and the tabloids and all the rest of it, how many journalists are prepared to give up their confidence, confidential sources, and to be less technical about it, what does a state without respect for privacy look like? Go and watch that lovely German film, the Lives of Others and a world without privacy. A state without privacy is a place without intimacy, dignity, or trust between human beings. It's not a very nice place to live. Now, that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be a qualified right, and it shouldn't be a balanced right. And we don't need necessary and proportionate limitations on privacy all the time. Every day. It just makes the exercise of balance even more important. And it means equal treatment becomes most important of all, because you always begin with the fingerprinting. It begins in schools, and it begins with asylum seekers. And so it goes on. The ID cards begin that way, too. And then it becomes acceptable and socially acceptable. And so it expands. And just to. We've got to touch on, haven't we, the Snowden revelations, because this is interesting for privacy. It's interesting for the whole citizenship versus universality point. And it's interesting, I think, for democracy and the rule of law. My biggest beef with what's been going on with PRISM and Tempora is this. It's actually a democratic political beef. It's not that people on both sides of the Atlantic decided that it was proportionate in response to threats from whatever, you know, terrorism, paedophilia, the list goes on. It's not that they made a decision that, you know, no doubt, with honest conviction that blanket surveillance of entire populations was legitimate and proportionate. It's that they took it upon themselves to do it in secret without telling their people that this was what was going on. And what is worse, what is worse is during the period when this was merely going on, we were having debates in this country about something that my colleagues, Brandon, the Snoopers charter. And because it's all Orwellian wars on words, they called it the Draft Communications Data Bill. We actually had a political debate in this country about whether blanket surveillance of the Internet and those sorts of communications was legitimate. And the bill stalled and was dropped and we were made fools of because they didn't need that. They were just doing it anyway. Right. And we know what the argument is. The argument is bad stuff happens online. Therefore the Internet should not be an ungoverned space like Afghanistan or Somalia or somewhere people are doing bad things. There's child pornography online, there's conspiracies to terrorism, all sorts of things online. So we've got to act and nothing to hide, nothing to fear. Now, my response is that bad stuff happens in the real world, too. And actually, as a feminist, I would say, I think Nicky would agree with me, a lot of really bad stuff happens in the home. Right? We're in a city where there are some domestic dwellings that have been around for hundreds of years. Lovely old townhouses in this city. You know where they are. They're everywhere. Any domestic dwelling that has stood for more than what, a decade, probably less, I guarantee, has been a crime scene. And I'm not talking about newfangled regulatory offences. I'm talking about sex offences and violent offences, all the way from common assault and indecent assault right up to rape and murder. The older the property, the more likely that is. So bad stuff happens in the real world, too. Why, David, we take this Internet argument and apply it to the real world, not just the virtual world, and say, well, nothing to hide, nothing to fear. Don't worry, all we're going to do is change the legal and physical architecture of this country. So it's now a requirement on architects and landlords to install cameras and microphones in every domestic dwelling, because we are so concerned, concerned about domestic violence and sex crime and so on. But don't worry, we're just going to scoop this stuff up because digital technology allows us to do that. We're not going to look at it. No, but think about it. That's what they're saying. That's the argument for the online surveillance. We're not going to look at it. We'll have all these Byzantine processes. Don't worry, we're just going to scoop it up. But there will be a camera and a microphone in your living room, possibly in your bedroom, and then if after the fact there's something suspicious about you or somebody makes a complaint about, you will be able to go back and check the archive to see what you were up to in your living room, in your bedroom three and a half weeks ago on a particular day, if you put it like that, particularly to an older generation of the British electorate and British public. And suddenly nothing to hide, nothing to fear. Doesn't feel quite so comfy, does it? And to younger audiences that I speak to, they feel that they're living their intimate lives more online than they are necessarily in the physical architecture of their home. But to go back to my point on universality and why it's so important, why we need human rights and not citizens privileges, look at how they got away with this. On both sides of the Atlantic, there were some slightly more rigorous protection for their own people in their own jurisdiction and practically nothing for the foreign jurisdiction and other people's citizens. I'll spy on yours if you spy on mine. It's a bit like, I'll show you mine if you show me yours. Right? And then we do the trade. Then we do the trade. Which is yet another reason for preserving the ideals of universal human rights rather than just local civil liberties or citizens privileges. Because otherwise, with this little trade and this international collaboration, it's not just terrorists that collaborate across national borders. It's not just multinational corporations and governments. It ought to be all of us with our universal human rights values as well, I would say. I would suggest so. Even the privacy piece shows the importance of universality. I've gone on. We must have time for discussion and for Connor's many drinks. So here's the thing. The extradition piece proves it and the detention piece proves it. The privacy piece proves it. The greatest threat to our freedoms, I would argue, in this country, you know, criminalization, yes, but the greatest threat of all is that we sign away rights and freedoms for other people that we think we can preserve for ourselves. And it won't work. The pick and mix of that kind will not work. It will not work. The easiest way to drive a coach and horses through hard won freedoms is by saying they won't be for everyone. They'll be for some people and not others. They'll be for my children and not yours. And that's really what's gone on, I would say on both sides of the Atlantic more than anything else. Post 9 11. That's what's being offered and it's very, very attractive. On the right of politics in particular, but not exclusively on the right of politics. Nationalism and that kind of parochial approach to freedom or equality or whatever the virtue is, is not just about the Right. Of politics. So there's the choice, I think, for Democrats in Britain as we head for a general election and all over the world, do you choose to be protected as a human being everywhere, or do you choose to take potluck as a foreigner nearly everywhere on the planet and say a little prayer and. And hope that your freedoms will be protected? I know which path I choose. Thanks very much.
- [62:44]
A
Terrific.
- [62:44]
G
Great.
- [62:44]
A
Thanks, Charmy, very much. Bradley, do you want to come up? Bradley's the Twitter guru. There he is, fully clothed. Now, look, we. We've got about half an hour, but run slightly over about half an hour, but we need to do this fairly speedily. So we've got a few tweets and we want to make a feeble who've done the tweets feel it's worthwhile. So we're going to come to you for one in a minute.
- [63:05]
G
Okay?
- [63:06]
A
I think we're going to take two or three in a row. We've the lady already well versed in lse, caught my eye. We've got gentlemen up there with I think, a rather lavish bow tie. Is that right, sir? Well done. Well done. You've caught my eye sartorially.
- [63:21]
G
Can I just say something on Twitter quickly, in case you're not worried about your privacy and your freedom? You can sign up to the cloud so you can have access to Wi Fi if you are interested in doing that. You find the Wi Fi, click the cloud, sign up if you don't already have an account, tweet us your comments and questions using LSEFreedom or directly to me on this at LSE Law. I do apologise.
- [63:44]
A
I mean, give him an inch. Give him an inch. Thank you, Bradley. I should have said that much earlier. You're welcome. Now, you need to say if you feel you can, who you are. And also it's, I think, going to be fairly short observation. We want to try and put a few in. And the chaps beside you where you go.
- [63:59]
E
Madam, I'm Nazreen from London. The question I have, or the issue that I wanted to ask was that you both talked about inequality. And it was interesting to me because in this country, I think whether or not it's true, the perception is that inequality is best solved by people like labor. But then on the other hand, as both of you pointed out, people like labor have also been the kinds of people who've intruded on freedom. And how do we go about resolving such a tension in this country? I can't even begin to think about the Big human rights thing because it was massive.
- [64:35]
A
Are you slightly asking them whether we should support labor or you're not?
- [64:38]
E
No, because I think so. Personally, I grew up just after 9 11. My parents were very. Pro labor until the creeping detention for 90 days. Should I look up anything about terrorism from my US module, it would be surname them like Nazir. It's a preemptive risk.
- [65:02]
A
Right, okay, we got it. I mean, I might add my little bit as an addendum. Thank you very much, Najreen.
- [65:08]
H
Sir, my name is Will Duffield. I'm an LSE student. Question regards press freedom. What are we to make of the forcible destruction of hard drives containing leaked NSA files at the Guardian? Given the fact that copies of these hard drives existed in other countries, we weren't really made any more secure as a result of these destructions. Was it just kind of security state posturing? And what does this say about the current relationship? Sort of. What does the Guardian's compliance say about the current relationship between the government and the fourth estate?
- [65:44]
D
Right.
- [65:45]
C
Thanks, Will.
- [65:45]
A
Very compact. We're going to take a tweet and then we'll come to you. Bradley, do we have a tweet?
- [65:50]
G
Yeah, sure.
- [65:50]
A
Which are going to be, period?
- [65:53]
G
So the first one we've got from Twitter is from Nick Cragan, who asks where national security is an issue. How should the judicial. I can never say this word, judiciary. Balance different deference with the protection of human rights.
- [66:07]
A
Very good.
- [66:08]
C
Marvelous.
- [66:08]
A
Thanks, Nick. Via Bradley, I'm going to be pretty.
- [66:13]
B
Quick on you, okay?
- [66:13]
A
Because we want another couple of rounds.
- [66:15]
B
Three in a row. So equality versus liberty is kind of what you're saying. You know, this is a bit of a bug on the left. There's always this kind of shami. I care about collective rights, I don't care about individual rights. I don't care about liberty. I care about equality. You're not saying that. What I say is, if you think that there is a straight choice between equality and liberty, tell that to a slave. And Eleanor Roosevelt famously said, human rights begin in small places close to him. When you actually think about what a human being needs for their dignity and to thrive, think about a guest coming to your home. And you don't say you can choose between equality and liberty. You don't say you get to stay for the weekend, but you get to choose between eating at the table and speaking at the table. You just don't do that. You can have a room for the night and you can have the bed and the shelter, but we'll put a camera in your bedroom. It doesn't work like that there. All of these rights, the social and economic and the civil and political, are part of what it is to respect a human being. They're just sometimes delivered by different mechanisms. In this country since the war, we've had a welfare state to help with social and economic rights, and we've had, you know, things like the ECHR to help as a backstop for the civil and political rights. And the bridge between the two is legal aid. And now even that has been decimated. So that's what I think about that will press freedom and hard drive. Bottom line, these spooks got a little bit out of control. And they don't even have the humility now, some of them, to say, we made a mistake, we'll do better in the future. We were going through tough times. They want no privacy for us and no scrutiny for them. And that is a really, really dangerous cocktail that they should not be allowed. And as to the iconography of busting up hard drives, you're right. It's just. It's just making a show, you know, and the Guardian, you know, they obviously made a tactical judgment, let people see spooks coming in and busting up our hard drives. We know the materials elsewhere. But the fact that the spooks and the state wanted that iconography and those optics, that's what should be. Should be chilling. I use the word chilling too much. Some clever person on the Internet said that Chakrabarti sees refrigerators everywhere. And national security and human rights. Okay, here's the thing. Liberty and security as it. Read Connor's book. Actually, that's the answer. Read Connor's book. Liberty and security is as false a choice as liberty and equality. And if you believe in human rights, you know, the human rights include the rights of life and positive obligations on the state to protect people from harm, as well as rights that require the state to restrain itself in how intrusive it is.
- [69:02]
A
Brilliant, Nicola.
- [69:04]
D
Just. I'll take them in reverse order and say something very brief on each. The one about national security. How should the judiciary balance deference with the protection of human rights? Very much agree with what Shami said. I'd just like to add one thing, that word deference. We have a constitutional system in this country in which it is appropriate to some extent to talk about deference to the legislature. But what we've really been talking about here is deference the executive. And that, I think, is a really dangerous thing. So that's one thing I Want to say, given the awfulness of what has happened around surveillance, I actually in some ways thought the iconography was very powerful. I could enjoy the iconography precisely because I think it had an impact. And knowing that the data had been reserved, I sort of felt that I was glad it got the attention it did. But I mean the whole thing was just distressing beyond belief. And your question about labor and the left more generally and I. I guess I think it's just so important to keep up the sort of critical analysis and campaigning and lobbying and just making good arguments for the way Shami did about the way in which equality underpins other rights. But I guess as a social scientist, I also think it's incredibly important to understand why Labour has moved in the direction it has. And I think there are real issues about things as basic as the way the electoral system works in this country that are part of this picture.
- [70:51]
A
Great, thanks, Nicky. And both for the discipline of the answers. Gentleman in blue. The thing is going right up there. This side has been neglected up to now. I'm tempted to take the lady in white directly in front of him. Got these two. We've got another tweet back center has been neglected, sir. Name and briefish question, please.
- [71:17]
I
Okay. My name is Danny D. Thank you for the excellent presentation. I think we seem to have a problem with the state. John Locke said we only have a perfect freedom in the state of nature. Is it ever possible to perfect these states or disempower this small elite? That really causing a problem because all our complaints about criminalization, all of these problems are about the state. So what can we do at this state, these monstrous state. That's my question. Thank you.
- [71:55]
A
Thank you, Danny. That's powerful. The lady in front of you should be now getting it. The microphone, madam.
- [72:02]
J
Thanks. I'm Amy and I'm a little bit of an optimist. It was a question for Nicola and it was just. I thought your talk was really interesting and I thought what you said about, you know, the government's making lots of criminal laws because governments around the world can't really do much else anymore was a really interesting point, really made me think. But I thought that it was important to note that we've also got rid of some really bad and liberal criminal laws like homosexual sexuality and, you know, things like that. And in that sense maybe we are more free and you know, if it's a criminal offence to keep some rancid meat in an abattoir, that's one thing. But I'm really glad that it's no longer a crime to be a homosexual.
- [72:42]
A
And is there a kind of question or is that just an observation? Sorry, just generally uplifting. Marvelous. Danny, there you are. That's the answer. Thank you very much, Emil. No, it's wonderful. There's a gentleman who caught my eye who's now got his left hand up and then we go to tweet. Yeah, that's it. Not you, sir. I'm terribly sorry, but you have a certain air of authority, so we might take you directly after. Sir.
- [73:08]
C
Hi, I'm Mejiki Cavalio from Citi and I just have a question. I wonder whether there is an issue embedded in both of these perspectives regarding trust and a problem with trust today. And I sense a tension in the sense that this demand for universality, which I think every one of us in principle agree with, is I think in essence a demand that we should trust each other and that we can't really achieve universality without this core of trust. And at the same time, I think Nikki alluded to this socio political climate today in which we have a problem which we feel we can't trust each other because we don't feel like we share the same fate or even the same social perspective with regards to life or politics with each other. So how do we solve this tension? I guess that's my question.
- [74:03]
A
Thanks, D. And sir, you are on if you've got it.
- [74:06]
C
Yeah, hi, my name is Saran and I'm a London resident. And my question is about the guidance given by the Law Society a couple of months ago on how to apply Sharia law. And I wonder if this is not like a backdoor to undermine equality and liberty.
- [74:29]
B
Thanks.
- [74:29]
A
And I guess you're referring to it being appropriate on occasion to deploy Sharia law. Yeah, you're nodding. Yeah, Bradley. We take a tweet and then we go to a lot of the menu there. But some observations.
- [74:41]
G
This one's from cgcitizen, who asks, shall the BBC be free enough to promote UKIP and ignore the Green Party during election time?
- [74:51]
A
Great question, CJ And I think it's actually also inviting us to have a word or two about the impact of UKIP as a phenomenon. I think it bears on some of the trust issues and some of the disempowerment issues. Nick, do you want to go first?
- [75:04]
D
Okay, I mean, great question. And I just touch on each of them very briefly. Can we ever disempower the elite or the state? I mean, we can't. There are always going to be elites and there's probably always going to be a state, but we can at least try to call it to account, criticize, speak up, vote. You know, I know that sounds anodyne, but we have to be realistic. Power has always existed. There were always elites, even in the world that we sometimes look back on with nostalgia. But that's, you know, nonetheless, that doesn't mean we can't act politically. And that leads on nicely to your very good intervention to remind us that it's not all been bad. And indeed, of course, it's quite wrong to feel, you know, I think when one thinks about this, the issues I was told talking about, it's very tempting to sort of look back to the post war era as an era of sort of more liberalism in a very broad way. But of course, you know, that's ridiculous because there have been a lot of important decriminalization, perhaps quantitatively, not so much, but the progress on sexuality, progress on abortion for me is very, very important. So there have been lots of advances. And of course, you know, speaking as a woman, one would hardly want to turn the clock back. So that isn't the issue. And there have been some gains. Your point, Enrique, about decline of trust? I think that's just incredibly important. And I think, you know, there's evidence from a lot of international studies that show that the societies that have low trust tens tend to be also the societies that have high inequality, high crime, high punishment, a whole lot of other things. So I think, you know, trying to rebuild that sense of universality and trust. Where do we do it? We can't just do it in the criminal justice system. We can't. We can do it somewhat through our political and social action. I think education, the education system is probably the most important social institution really there. The only thing I would say about your question about Sharia law is that I wouldn't single Sharia law out in terms of these guidelines on how other legal systems are dealt with within a particular space. There are lots of ways in which other legal orders get recognition. For instance, Jewish law in some family matters. These all raise some quite difficult questions around universality. But yeah, so that's what I'll say about that. The tweet. I'm going to pass on that one.
- [77:52]
A
Yep, fine.
- [77:54]
C
Yeah.
- [77:54]
A
It's not compulsory and if you give Shaw, I mean, certainly deal with that one and the others, Chris Key and we might get another round.
- [77:59]
B
You see on the tweet, you know, everyone gets cross with the BBC, but, you know, I think it's a great institution like the nhs, you'd miss it if it were gone. I, I think they've got certain rules that actually. Do you remember the big fuss about having the BNP on Question Time? Everyone got very hot under the COVID about it, but actually it was the right thing to do. And they have rules, they have rethink rules that kind of work about when people get a certain percentage of the vote and they have to be dealt with. And I kind of agree with that. The whole no platform thing I don't think works in the Internet age. And I think it was always attack. My own view was it was a tactic that some people on the left turned into a principle, even a religion. You know, it works if we're having a town hall meeting, I'm like, I'm not going to dignify that person and that, and that person doesn't get heard. But that's not going to work in the age of the, at the Internet. So I put my, my view, surprise, surprise, is that people need to be taken on. They would think, you know, whether they're Ukip or the BNP or whoever it is that's on the ascendancy with the politics of ignorance and hate and xenophobia and all the rest of it at a particular time. And of course they feed on mistrust. We're talking about trust. My experience of trust is firstly that it's not necessarily as bleak a picture as you might think. I think actually we've lost trust in great institutions of power and elites in this country. First it was the, the government over the Iraq war. How could they lie to us over weapons of mass destruction? Then it was the MPs. Don't be scroungers and don't be committing anti social behavior. I'll have some more expenses, please. So we lost trust in them. Then it was those nice bank managers and look at what they got up to. And then we had to have socialism for the bank managers, didn't we? To bail them, right? So we lost trust in the bank managers. Then the journalists who we trusted to hold all the powerful. Then they were, you know, phone hacking and Leveson and all of that. And yet we need these institutions because democracy does need these institutions. So we actually need to rebuild trust in institutions that are reformed and that have checks and balances that I'm not anti state, which links to the point about the state and the monstrous state. I believe in the state because I believe that we aren't just individual, individual creatures, we are social creatures and we do great things when we come together. But, you know, whether it's big business or big charity or big government, we need checks and balances. And that's my big beef with the current political class. They don't believe in checks and balances. They are too many of them, constitutionally illiterate. I'm sorry if that sounds a bit snotty, but they talk about unelected judges. How dare they? That used to be kind of, you know, the hard left that used to want to elect the judges. Now it's sort of David Cameron and Michael go, they want to elect the judges?
- [80:51]
A
Really?
- [80:52]
D
Of course they do.
- [80:54]
B
Well, great. Well, Barabbas will always go free. And what's left? Deferent.
- [81:00]
D
Yeah.
- [81:01]
B
I mean, deference. What they're really saying is they don't recognize the legitimacy of any other players in. In democracy and in the constitution, except that they want a blank check. I've won an election. I haven't even won an election. I've done a deal after a hung parliament and that's it. I'm going to get a blank cheque for five years. And therefore no human rights, no rule of law, no independent judiciary. I don't think so. That's how democracy eats itself. And it only lasts for five minutes and then suddenly it's Zimbabwe or wherever. And Amy's point is a good one. And of course there were great gays. And whenever I'm looking to say nice things about Mr. Blair's human rights record, I'll go, oh, but we've got gay equality. But what I will say is that didn't just happen through the kindness of anyone's heart. It is phenomenal that we have a Conservative Prime Minister who's prepared to upset his right wing by instituting gay marriage. But let's look at how that journey actually happened. It was Section 28 of the infamous Local Government act and it was a popular movement that responded to that homophobic Thatcherite legislation. That's how we got where we are today. It was people coming out to their parents, in their homes and all the pain that was involved in that. It was people taking to the streets over section 28 and then. And it was litigation in the infamous Court of Human Rights. Thank you very much. It wasn't just because these nice Tory and New Labour boys woke up one day and thought, oh, I believe in gay equality. These were people struggles and they were legal struggles. And let's never forget that.
- [82:38]
A
Good couple. Yes. Not too long, not too long. The lady in green. And do we have. I'm sort of thinking I will have this lady and that'll balance it out. And then we have to stop. So can we run down. Here we are four from the bottom and then get the. To the lady dressed in black, Madam.
- [82:58]
F
Thank you. Yes, my name is Liz Sais, I work in disability. We're seeing more and more people with mental health problems being detained compulsorily, both in hospitals and treated against their will in the community. The community bit was meant to mean less people being detained in hospitals against their will, but actually both just rise and rise inexorably and it's all about the threshold of risk gets ever, ever greater. So, you know, you might possibly be a risk to somebody else or to yourself. You've got no way of demonstrating that you're not going to do anything. It's the preemptive point you raised. And also, if you have complete capacity to make decisions for yourself, the law still says you can be treated against your will. I wondered if you could just say it touches on the point that Nicola made about who is being impacted by some of this pre emptive stuff and there are some opportunities around with the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities examining the UK and so on. I just wondered what hope for doing something through some of those mechanisms.
- [83:59]
A
Thanks, Liz, that's great. Actually, we haven't dealt with much on that and that might be to you, Nikki, and also the international bit. And now, madam, that's the last question from the floor. We have no more tweets.
- [84:09]
E
My name is Katie Key, I'm a student from London. Sharmi, you were talking about how a degree of privacy is needed in, like, juries and stuff to ensure the smooth running. But do you think that privacy also applies to politicians and their dealings, for example, Tony Blair and George Bush regarding the Iraq war? Surely we deserve transparency regarding that if all of our emails and text messages can be looked at by them.
- [84:36]
A
Right, nice one.
- [84:37]
C
Very good.
- [84:38]
A
I think we go with Shami and we give Nikki the last word. So I think these divide up. Actually, if you could take the second one. Yeah, why not? Why not?
- [84:46]
B
Then WE RATTLE so, do I think that privacy extends to emails about the Iraq war between George Bush and Tony Blair? No. Why? Because there's a difference between privacy and secrecy. I go back to my point. They want no privacy for us and no scrutiny for them. This, you know, this was their work in our name on our behalf. This information belongs to us. We have a right to know. This is not their intimate lives. Well, it may have been their intimate.
- [85:20]
D
Lives.
- [85:25]
B
To be honest. I'm far less interested in, you know, in tycoons, wives and all of that stuff than I am in the conversations and the communications about life and death and things war and peace. And that's not the private sphere. That is just not the. That's not the private sphere. That's easy. But as I say, they want to protect all of that. They've increased secrecy in the same period that they've minimised our privacy. And I think that's really, really telling in terms of power and in terms of justice, in terms of checks and balances and the kind of democratic society you want to live in. Nicky's going to deal with the mental health point, but I just say this. You know, they say we don't like the Human Rights act because it gives rights to prisoners. Well, there are prisoners, including unlikely prisoners everywhere in domestic homes, in residential care. And they need the convention and they need the Human Rights Act. And with our aging population and all the issues of resources and care and decent care that that throws up, those prisoners need the Human Rights act as much as the convicted ones in our bulging prisons.
- [86:39]
C
Great.
- [86:39]
D
Well, I'm very glad that you've raised the question of mental health mentally ill people because they, I mean, I could easily have taken them as an example of, you know, relatively voiced group who have been very much subject and over quite a long period of time, these preventive measures and caught up in the increasingly, you know, sophisticated and arcane processes of risk assessment. And I just like to, you know, something on which my colleague Jill Peyton, who's actually here tonight, is a real expert. But I'd like to just on a final note, tie that up with the point that was made about trust, because I think that one of the things that's going on with all this belief that we can make the world a safer place and pander to our own and others demands for security itself betrays a certain lack of trust, a certain kind of growth of atomism, which I think is terribly important through our social and activism to counter. And I think, you know, I'm glad that you've mentioned that very poignant example at the end to finish this off and remind us just how complicated but how important these issues are.
- [88:04]
A
Gillespie's talk is online. We did a talk about what is October12 months ago on that, and that's online. So we have got a whole session of one of our conversations devoted to that. It's been a fantastic evening. We're just finished two minutes ahead because obviously we're exactly an hour and A half. Can I plug something? I mean, we don't normally have anything to plug because we're going into the long vacation. It's fantastic, this number of people here. We're having a constitutional carnival. A constitutional carnival at LSE in the fantastic new Students Union building. Irish designed, world record holder. LSE even got a prize for having the good sense to use these architects. Architectural customer of the year or something. And it's on the 26th of June. 26th of June and it starts about 4 o'.
- [88:52]
C
Clock.
- [88:52]
A
We're having a steel band. We have a special rap which has been commissioned. A commissioned constitutional rap. We have morris dancers doing a specially commissioned constitutional morris dance. But no, it's not comedy. These are fantastic artistic events. But we also have MPs, members of the House of Lords, students, young people arguing about whether we should be a republic, whether we should have the House of Lords, what kind of voting we should have, whether we should have guaranteed social and economic rights. In other words, this is now the we as law, but it's also the Institute of Public Affairs. We want to try and demystify this stuff about constitutions. We've got a website, www.constitutionuk where we've talked to people who don't think they have a constitutional point of view until it emerges they have one which is better informed and in inverted commas, more real than that of the so called experts. So it's in that spirit we're doing it. You can find it on the website. And obviously it's June, there's no students. We'd love you to come along to make up the numbers. We may even have. I can't remember. I think we have a drink afterwards from a large class that we share.
- [90:04]
B
I forgot. My colleagues will kill me. Please have a look at Liberty's website. We need you to. To join us.
- [90:09]
A
Join. Look at the lapel bag.
- [90:11]
B
I wear the thing enough.
- [90:12]
A
She's so unreliable. Her colleagues pinned that to her when she left the office and even with it on, she forgot to say that. Join Liberty Now. And Nicky, do you want us to join anything?
- [90:23]
B
You've.
- [90:23]
A
I mean you. I mean. No, no. You got some.
- [90:26]
D
I'm already a member.
- [90:29]
A
Thanks to Bradley. Bradley's the person who has livened up these debates so tremendously at LSE Laws. We're very grateful to him. Thanks to the stewards who've been running around to get the microphones to you in time. But thanks to yourselves for coming and especially the students. A few of you, our students. Fantastic that you were able to come, despite the pressure of exams, mainly. And now we, after this round of applause, walk outside where I think there will be drinks. You'll have seen some astute members of the audience leaving early, allegedly, to get the train home. Well, we know where they are. But just before you do that, a round of applause for our two fantastic makers.