Things can only get better

In constitutional terms, Tony Blair’s legacy is as the architect of a programme of ongoing vandalism against our civil liberties, which many of us (wrongly) have taken for granted:

• ID cards. Apart from the escalating cost of the scheme, the connected identity database will contain a huge amount of information about us. That is information not already on the huge DNA database – which includes people who were not convicted.
• Back in 2000, the Terrorism Act introduced powers for the Government to stop, search and detain terrorist suspects without any reasonable grounds for suspicion. It has been used thousands of times against non-terrorists, including at the 2005 Labour Party conference against a heckler.
• And then we had control orders introducing the concept of house arrest on British as well as non-British terrorist suspects.
• All offences became arrestable with the Serious Organised Crime Act 2005. And it’s not as if the ASBO system is working either, with over a third of them being breached.
• The attempt to introduce 90 days detention before charge for terrorist suspects.
• The prospect of trials without a jury looms for fraud trials, following the abolition of the double jeopardy rule and the attack on the right to silence.
• The Racial & Religious Hatred Act, which sought, amongst other things, to make comedians criminals.
• Who could forget our poodle-like ex-PM with his US extradition treaty – not what most considered as our “special relationship”!
• In Europe, things were hardly better – with the European Arrest Warrant allowing British citizens to be extradited extra-fast, without proper safeguards between EU member states. In the meantime, the Tampere agenda has provided for a European search warrant and more harmonisation on home affairs matters to come (without a referendum).
• The undermining of the historic office of the Lord Chancellor and the constitutional mish-mash inherent in the new Ministry of Justice (is that name from 1984?), the creation of the unnecessary new Supreme Court, the replacement of the House of Lords with an unelected House of Cronies, the destruction of the legal aid system and the failure to end fraud in the electoral system.
• And all that is before we get on to devolution – which is now likely to threaten the Union.

But don’t worry under New Labour “things can only get better” – or so they claimed back in 1997.