Of all the New Labour toadies, Jack Straw must be the worst
Matthew Norman, The Independent:
[T]he country awoke yesterday in a frenzy of concern about the perils posed to what passes as British democracy by Nick Griffin, an obnoxious creep, yes, but fundamentally a mirthless joke with the same prospects of affecting public life one iota as Andrew Neil has of being cast as the lead in a Cary Grant biopic.
Meanwhile, this newspaper devoted its front page to news of Mr Straw's latest assault on the kind of democratic principle we once regarded as sovereign, and all too few eyelids will have blinked in alarm. The Injustice Secretary's attempt to win the power to render public inquests public no more, and have them held under such blanket secrecy that even the deceased's family would be excluded, isn't merely a scandal. It is an outrage that would, in a less ovine and apathetic nation, lead to the overturning of ministerial cars and the lobbing through Whitehall windows of Molotovs.
Unusually, the fact of this one is arguably less offensive than the method. Perhaps it's just being inured to attacks on civil liberties and human rights after a dozen years under a government that cannot glance at them without sending its valet off for the hobnail boots. The list is so long and familiar (right to silence, right to trial by jury, habeas corpus, DNA storage etc, etc) that the tolerance level rises, as it does to arsenic.
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All one can do is hope, with virtually zero confidence, that David Cameron means it when he promises to reverse this foaming tide of disdain towards the rights of humble subjects.
What startles even this grizzled student of New Labour autocracy is the method Mr Straw deployed, in vain, to get this one on the statute book. Twice before he had tried, and twice been rebuffed. As recently as May, having reintroduced it back in January, he withdrew the measure from the Coroners and Justice Bill, apparently accepting that the political opposition was too fierce.
"It is clear the provisions still do not command the necessary cross-party support," he said. Within six months of that grudging admission, he elected to circumvent that opposition by burying these proposals deep within the Bill, although not deep enough to evade the prying eyes of the Lords, who soundly rejected them. In one sense, there is something pleasingly holistic about this approach. How better to pass law granting unjustifiable secrecy than by stealth? In another sense, so arrogant and blatant violation of democratic principle induces violent nausea.
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A painful inquest into the death of New Labour approaches, and whatever Jack Straw's feelings on the matter this one will be held in public.
