The Interpretation Has To Change

Did the McCanns have their other two children taken away from them? Those twins were two when their parents left them with their not quite four-year-old sister in a foreign country and went out on the town. People without the McCanns’ advantages lose their children for far less. Yet Gerry McCann is now the face of the campaign to relaunch the Leveson Inquiry, although other signatories would have made for far more sympathetic spokespersons. But less media-savvy ones. Think on.

The Press and the Police ought to have been the starting point of Leveson, and I reproach myself for the fair wind that I gave his first Report, although those who opposed it have since demanded, and obtained, cross-party primary legislation to give the Government the final say on the ownership of newspapers. Three weeks ago, the nationalisation of the Telegraph was called for at Prime Minister’s Questions by Mike Wood, who as the Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office would not ordinary have been an active participant in PMQs, and who had been Parliamentary Private Secretary to Liam Fox, Priti Patel, and Dominic Raab. That was what the Right openly wanted.

But nothing in the European Convention on Human Rights would have precluded the implementation of the original Leveson requirements, nor has anything prevented this novel approach to safeguarding the Free Press. The same is true of David Lammy’s abolition of almost all trial by jury and of the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court, again going back to Sir Brian Leveson. As ever, it will rightly fall to Parliament. Based on today’s PMQs, Karl Turner is obviously planning to table a sunset clause. MPs ought in any case to oppose this Bill at every stage, but without that clause, then any waverers or mere abstainers would have no excuse whatever.

In the last 10 years alone, the ECHR did not prevent the enactment of the Trade Union Act, or of the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act, or of the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, or of the Nationality and Borders Act, or of the Elections Act, or of the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act, or of the National Security Act, or of the Public Order Act, or of the Online Safety Act, or of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, or of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. Under the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act and the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, nothing that Freddie Scappaticci did would now be illegal.

The ECHR will not save us from digital ID or from facial recognition. It does not protect cash. It is not helping the Palestine Action defendants. It does not preclude the Home Secretary from stripping people of their British citizenship, now without even having to tell them. It presented no obstacle to vaccine passports. It did nothing for Julian Assange, Vanessa Beeley, Craig Murray, Kit Klarenberg, Richard Medhurst, or now George Galloway. Most countries that subscribe to the ECHR already have identity cards. Thus defined, Starmer is indeed a human rights lawyer. When Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick were in office, then there was no section 35 order to prevent Royal Assent of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Bill that banned nothing for which people were not already being arrested in England, complete with records of non-crime hate incidents on things like DBS checks.

Nothing that had largely been written by David Maxwell Fyfe ever did have anything to do with those of us who sought to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty. Not the European Union into which he castigated Anthony Eden for not having taken the United Kingdom at the start. And not the ECHR, either.

There was a reason why the ECHR’s incorporation into British domestic law was never attempted by any Labour Government until Tony Blair’s. It duly proved useless as civil liberties were shredded; it was the House of Commons that stopped the detention of people for 90 days without charge. And it duly proved useless as the poor, the sick and the disabled were persecuted on a scale and with a venom that had not been seen since before the War, if ever. That persecution continued into and as the age of austerity. Long before Brexit, Covid-19, or the invasion of Ukraine, even as Red Cross food parcels were distributed to our starving compatriots, human rights legislation was of only the most occasional use, if any. That has always been the intention.

In May 1948, the pompously self-styled Congress of Europe assembled in the Hall of Knights, in The Hague. Addressing that assembly, Winston Churchill called it “the Voice of Europe”. But in fact it was mostly made up of politicians who had recently been defeated at the polls, of the representatives of Royal and Noble Houses that had fairly recently been dispossessed at least in political terms, of the likes of Churchill who fell into both categories, and of people whose lives’ work was trying to delude themselves that so did they.

In the name of the order that had held sway for a century between the defeat of Napoleon and the First World War, the order to which the Reichsbürger would wish to return, their aim was very explicitly to check the social democracy that was sweeping Western Europe at the time. The material that they produced had that intention, and it has had that effect. Lo and behold, Blair had it written into British domestic law. And lo and behold, the body that he created for its enforcement, when it has not been sacking its black and disabled staff first, and when it has not been failing to find anything wrong with the Government’s handling of the Windrush scandal, played a key role in bringing down Jeremy Corbyn. Not that he helped himself by backing down when he ought to have been fighting back. But “Equality and Human Rights”? What equality, exactly? Which human’s rights?

To make matters even worse, the land of Churchill and Maxwell Fyfe, with comparable figures on the other side, is now the land of Starmer and Lammy, facing only Badenoch and Jenrick. Denmark’s “parallel societies", until 2021 officially called "ghettos", are wholly compatible with membership of NATO. They are wholly compatible with membership of the EU. They are wholly compatible with the ECHR. They are the work of a Social Democratic Government, like the social media ban in Australia. And they are wanted here by the Labour Government, likewise. On all five points, of course they are. And on a sixth: race is not the primary indicator in an industrial or postindustrial country such as Britain or Denmark, so Britain is to copy Denmark’s “parallel societies”, and Denmark will return the compliment once we had expanded the scheme.

The first criterion for a "parallel society" is that more than 50 per cent of the inhabitants originated or “descended” from “non-Western countries", defined as everywhere apart from “all 27 EU countries, the United Kingdom, Andorra, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Norway, San Marino, Switzerland, Vatican City, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand”. But the other four are socioeconomic. Once it had met the racist first one, then a community has to meet only two of those four to have all of its children from the age of one upwards required to undergo 25 hours per week of instruction in “Danish culture”, and to be declared liable to mass eviction and demolition in the manner of Sharpeville, District Six, or the West Bank. After a few years, Britain would drop the whitelist and just ghettoise everywhere with two or more of unemployment at 40 per cent or above, criminal convictions more than three times the national average (as if the criminal justice system were class-neutral), 50 per cent or more of over-30s without tertiary qualifications, and an average gross income below 55 per cent of the national average. Adjusting for different education systems, Denmark and elsewhere would follow suit.

Not that the change would be that enormous. It was Durham County Council, then the jewel in the right-wing Labour crown, that imposed Category D status. Even if not in detail, everyone in these parts has always known about Medomsley Detention Centre; we are shocked but not surprised. Parallel societies are nothing new to us. The British State inflicts sexual violence on working-class, predominantly white males as the American State inflicts sexual violence on African-American and Hispanic males, as the Australian State inflicts sexual violence on Aboriginal males, as the Israeli State inflicts sexual violence on Palestinian males, and so on. That, and false allegations of sexual violence. Fear of the black male is fundamental to the capitalist system that was founded on the transatlantic slave trade, and the slave trade financed enclosure. There has always been One Struggle.