One important lesson from the Blair years is that constitutional reforms are easiest and tidiest when they are enacted in the early years of a regime. As numerous observers have noted, had Scottish devolution and the creation of the Greater London Assembly not occurred in the early years of Blair’s first term, it’s not certain that they would have happened at all. The protracted nature of House of Lords reform is a glimpse of how messily governments deal with matters of democratic principle once they become too accustomed to power.
Gordon Brown needs to consider this syllogism from the opposite perspective. Just as fresh-faced newcomers are best placed to deliver cogent constitutional reform, cogent constitutional reform is the best basis for appearing like a fresh-faced newcomer. There is no better recipe for ushering in both the appearance and the reality of a new political era than to rewrite the rules of the British state.
An area that is ripe for exactly this approach is the politics of data gathering. It is the nature of our current digital age that while the information architecture of the state is of profound social and political significance, it has no designer. It tends to emerge over time thanks to a series of ad hoc decisions about how data should and shouldn’t be stored. A certain accident or tragedy will occur in one bit of government, and that will lead to new rules to anticipate the same thing happening again, rather as we are now compelled to remove our shoes in airports because of the antics of Richard Reid the shoe-bomber.
There is an assumption that the tide can only point in one direction when it comes to data-sharing and digital surveillance, thanks to perceptions of where technology and terrorism are taking us. To suggest that privacy safeguards and limits upon the State still have a role is to leave one open to the charge of naiveté and softness. There are two reasons to resist this depressing sense of inevitability.
First, technology tends to perform as a panacea for various arms of government, especially the security services. Although procurement practices have improved dramatically as a result of senior private sector consultants joining Whitehall, the desire to throw technology at problems has not significantly declined. Private sector knowledge management experts employ a rule that offers a lesson to the UK government: keep the technologists out of the discussion until you can keep them out not a moment longer. This is a result of being scarred by decades of bad procurement and management strategies that put machines before people.
The most obvious way in which Gordon Brown can learn from this is to ditch the ID card proposal. The ID card is currently a solution looking for a problem. Not only that, it is such an expensive and elaborate solution, it is hard to conceive of a problem that could be adequate to it. Equally, although the British people are notoriously unconcerned by the fact that our CCTV cameras make them the most watched nation on earth, Brown may wish to pay more attention to the criminological evidence on the poor levels of crime prevention that this vast infrastructural outlay has delivered. To frame these issues in more Brownite terms, many of our surveillance technologies are a rip-off.
Second, Gordon Brown will need a bit of naiveté if he is to rebuff the challenge of an opponent who will be able to play to the anti-government sentiments that have long been brewing in the British public. We don’t have a libertarian tradition as exists in the US, but Brown would do well to develop a critique of the notion that Whitehall wonks always know best. Governments get things wrong; the intelligent political response is not to hire more consultants in pursuit of perfection, but to introduce rules that will temper those failings.
Brown will obviously not want to appear soft on terrorism or crime. But he can stand up for transparency and due process nevertheless. There are areas such as Freedom of Information and data-sharing protocols, where New Labour policy has recently lost sight of questions of principle, and become entirely dominated by a somewhat jaded policy pragmatism. The longer term dangers of leaving it to experts and civil servants to determine how complex technologies are regulated and used can scarcely be overstated.
Achieving a sense of due process and rule of law in an age of rapidly developing and often invisible technologies is extremely tough. But attempting to do so, as the European Commission has recently done in engaging the public on RFID tag regulation, is both noble and bold. Why not rethink the rules of information in the digital age from the ground up? That is precisely the sort of optimistic – perhaps over-optimistic – policy that characterised New Labour in the mid and late 90s. From Freedom of Information to data-sharing to privacy rights to surveillance rights, both the public and the State have developed a sense of helpless resignation at the direction policy takes. A new settlement for the digital age is precisely the sort of wide-eyed ambition that ought to characterise a new political era.