Trying to collect my thoughts for this piece, I asked myself: what is the nub of the question? What, in journalistic parlance, is the catchline? Basically, I concluded, it s the law and order vs civil liberties argument.
At that, I leaped from the sofa on which I had lain pondering (so many politicians seem to emerge fully formed; I m afraid I m still at the working-things-out stage). In a flash it had become clear that the question, as so often, contains its own answer.
The notion of law and order vs civil liberties is nonsense. There is no such contradiction. It is easy to make it seem as though there is, but there isn t. This is the battleground of over-liberal sophists and insidious authoritarian chancers. As a party we must have the certainty of purpose and the clarity of mind to go elsewhere.
Some examples are easy: Robert Caro s Years of Lyndon Johnson relates the following story: In 1946, a young black sergeant, discharged from the army just three hours before at a demobilisation centre in Atlanta, boarded a bus for South Carolina. When the driver refused to let him use the lavatory, the sergeant argued with him, and at the next town, Batesburg, South Carolina, the driver called the police. Two policemen dragged the young veteran, still in uniform, from the bus, took him to jail and ground out both his eyes with a blackjack.
That man had his civil liberties violated. Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko and Martin Luther King had their human rights infringed.
And the constituent of mine, a woman in her seventies, in whose dark front room I sat last winter as she sobbed convulsively with terror that the youths who had burst through her window the fortnight before would at any minute do so again that woman, too, had had her civil liberties, badly, violated.
That is your fault. You are responsible for what is happening to that woman. Just as I am, and David Blunkett is, and we all are; and no man is an island, and there is such a thing as society, and if she can t protect herself, and her next door neighbour s very willing but 68 and arthritic, and the other side are lovely too, but 25 and never in, and the police are sympathetic but too busy, then somebody else one of us, or all of us, but not her, so somebody has got to take responsibility for asserting that defenceless old person s right not to be sobbing with fear that she s about to be battered every time she hears the second hand on her mantle clock click into its next slot.
So. I want to know what you are going to do about this. I want to hear how you, personally, are going to guarantee to that defenceless pensioner that what happened to her two weeks before will never happen again. I want your promise that she no longer has to jump every time the clock ticks. And I want the same for every other old person in Britain. Indeed, for everyone.
And when we ve got these civil liberties issues sorted, then we can talk about the rest of the project: the erosion of the right to trial by jury, and the supposed unleashing of a fearsome secret state caused by tackling international terrorism and organised crime, and all those other things that people keep stopping me in the street about.
When my decent, law-abiding constituents can leave their houses at night without fear, that would be the time to talk about these civil liberties issues.
I was asked to write something philosophical ; so here it is: good political decision-making depends on understanding the hierarchy of what is important to society, and upon ensuring that we never take a view which has anything but pure reality as its contextual backdrop. Think about it. And get real.