Bonfire Of The Liberties

Keith Ewing's latest offering is an insightful analysis of the continuing erosion of civil liberties under the new Labour project.

Previously a co-author of Freedom under Thatcher: Civil Liberties inModern Britain, Professor Ewing has a proven track record in the examination of governmental human rights abuses.

As professor of public law at King's College London and a leading civil liberties lawyer you would expect the author to be well equipped to deal with the issue.

The book examines the insidious attack on civil liberties by new Labour since 1997 and successive ministers' cynical distortions and manipulations of the truth in doing so.

As a handy catalogue of the duplicity and chicanery displayed by this administration it is excellent.

The book is perhaps strongest in addressing the introduction of new powers of arrest and surveillance handed to the constabulary over the last 13 years.

The assessment of the development - and abuse - of stop and search legislation is rightly given much space and is timely in the light of an Equality and Human Rights Commission survey this week.

It found that black people are still six times more likely to be pulled over and searched than whites and those of perceived Asian nationality twice so.

There is also an interesting section dissecting the cult of the anti-social behaviour order and new powers of arrest and search and the main argument advanced is that all these measures are further steps towards a lessening of the evidentiary threshold required for police to arrest an individual.

Perhaps the book's greatest achievement is to translate often dense legal argument into something slightly more palatable to the general reader.

At times it does get bogged down but on such occasions it is generally germane to the argument.

Making use of a number of high-profile cases - the G20 protests, control orders, Jean Charles de Menezes and the recent "pre-emptive" arrest and infiltration of climate protesters - the author is able to graphically explode the myth, if anyone is deluded enough to still cling to it, of new Labour being a party which has introduced new legislation to protect its citizens.

The justification still occasionally used in the government's defence - generally by the government itself - is that "this was the party which introduced the Human Rights Act after all."

It did, belatedly and in much diluted form, in 2001. But since then it has done its best to pretend it hadn't.

As Ewing points out, it has been mainly left to the European Court of Human Rights to defend this country's freedoms. Our own judiciary is seemingly unable or unwilling to do the job.

That is, until recently.

But there are a number of caveats with the book. Perhaps it is unfair to be too critical of the author for his almost total failure to address the issue of the government's complicity in its own citizens' kidnap and torture at the hands of the US.

Many of the more sensational developments have been relatively recent, but the book does state that it is dealing with issues from 1997 to the present day.

To his credit, the author is strong on the use of control orders and detention without trial against foreign terror suspects here in Britain.

But to have six pages devoted to CCTV surveillance and barely one paragraph speculatively referring to Britain's role in the extraordinary rendition of Binyam Mohamed, Shaker Aamer and others is a glaring and puzzling omission.

On this issue at least, it is the British courts which are currently upholding the rule of law and attempting to prevent the government drawing a veil over its unpalatable partnership in crime with the US.

SCATHING: Morning Star cartoonist Martin Rowson's take on the wrong arm of the law