Bassam and his "crazed puppet-master"

[Ian Brown]

A few choice excerpts from (Lord) William Rees-Mogg's column in the Times
today.
--
My sympathies are entirely with Euan Blair. If a gentleman wishes to take
an alfresco nap after dinner in Leicester Square, why should he not do so?
England is a free country, or was until quite recently...

Lord Bassam is becoming something of a cult figure in the House of Lords,
rather similar to Baldrick in Blackadder. At first it was thought that we
could safely laugh as he fingered his way through the Home Office briefs,
searching feverishly for the wrong answer, and meekly thanking his
tormentors for their helpful questions. 

Then we began to feel rather ashamed of ourselves, like schoolboys who have
been caught out bullying, all the more so as Lord Bassam has to read out
Home Office statements which are usually illiberal or incoherent or both.
It is bad enough to be a puppet, without having one's strings pulled by a
crazed puppet-master. Nowadays we are rather on Lord Bassam's side, though
we tend to assume that his actual proposals will be unacceptable.

My indolent quasi-attention to the Home Office statement was sharply
concentrated when he came to this sentence: "Under the new scheme, it would
not therefore be necessary that the person in question should have been
convicted of a football-related offence, or indeed of any offence." This is
a new concept in British law, that a wholly innocent person, never
convicted of any offence, perhaps never even charged with any offence,
should nevertheless suffer the substantial penalty of the removal of his
passport...

Mrs Gwyneth Dunwoody got it right. She said to the Home Secretary: "Those
of us who have spent a lifetime opposing racism have considerable
reservations about his suggestions, which will give peremptory powers to
police officers apparently on the basis of very little evidence."

Two serious issues arise. The first is public policy towards crime. This
should be rational, determined, researched, effective and lawful. It should
not be panicky, irresolute, ill-considered, ineffective and unfair.

The second is the illiberal attitude of the Government. We are now
protected only by the thin red line of the House of Lords from a spate of
illiberal legislation, conceived in panic, which attacks all the
traditional safeguards of the criminal law, the presumption of innocence,
recourse to the courts, a fair trial before conviction, conviction before
sentence, trial by jury itself. 

Fortunately, the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Independent peers
stand together on these civil rights issues. Repression may have the votes
in the other House, but liberty has the majority in the House of Lords. The
hysteria plainly starts at the top of the Government. The Prime Minister
needs a long holiday; the Home Secretary has fully earnt his retirement. 

http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/2000/07/10/timopnope01003.html