At a city council by-election earlier this year, I knocked on the door of a declared Liberal Democrat supporter to be met with a torrent of abuse. He had changed his mind. He said the council was guilty of 'letting in immigrants who take our jobs'. Behind the rant, I detected fear: fear of the possible loss of job and home because of the recession. I see fear as the greatest threat to a liberal society because it feeds intolerance in the search for easy solutions.
Fear of crime
Fear of crime remains stubbornly high at a time when crime has been falling. Perception is all. Young people may be doing nothing wrong when congregating together, but in large numbers they can seem intimidating. For too many people, there is an unjustified perception that it is unsafe to go out in the evening and even more unsafe to venture into the city centre. Reducing that fear of crime is vital if we are to enhance liberal values.
Increasing the number of ASBOs or the number of criminal offences or the number of prison places will not make Britain safer. The unintended consequence of such policies can be to increase crime. Some individuals see an ASBO as an achievement. Crime inevitably rises as more categories of offences reach the statute book. And prison numbers rise with insufficient attention paid to the long-term consequences for an individual's rehabilitation.
Mitigating the impact of the recession
Unemployment could hit four million within the next three years. This is dangerous. Leaders in local government must urgently identify new jobs in areas of sustainable growth – in our case, for example, wind turbine manufacture and the commercialisation of scientific and medical research.
As a council, we are doing all we can to mitigate the impact of the recession – increased capital investment through more borrowing, more apprenticeships, increased spending on infrastructure and more help for small businesses. We must try to procure more locally by dividing up contracts to enable more local companies to tender.
Inequality increases public spending
It is a major worry that, after 60 years of the welfare state, Britain is now more unequal than at any time since modern records began 50 years ago. Unequal societies are more dysfunctional – and cost more in terms of public spending – than societies which are more equal. Absolute levels of wealth in a country are secondary. If we want a more tolerant, liberal society, we have to spread wealth more fairly. Greater equality would improve public health and reduce crime. We would have less obesity, lower alcohol consumption and less crime. Prevention is better and cheaper in the long term, even if it is more expensive in the short term.
The need for a freedom bill
A freedom bill is needed to repeal the repressive legislation of successive governments over the past 20 years. A bill has been drafted by the Liberal Democrats dealing with specific challenges to traditional liberties. They include the scrapping of ID cards, the abolition of control orders, the restoration of rights to public assembly, the abolition of the criminalisation of trespass, the restoration of the right to silence when accused in court, restrictions on the use of surveillance powers to serious crimes, the removal of innocent people from the national DNA database, and the better regulation of closed-circuit television (CCTV).
We should not be confiscating the cameras of tourists in the name of 'fighting terrorism', nor should reasonable democratic protest be seen as a form of terrorism. We must not blur the distinction between civil and criminal law, nor should we put the police in the position of making decisions that determine the right to protest in advance.
However, we need to maintain a sense of perspective. CCTV use is popular and reduces the fear of crime. We need to be clear whose liberty we are protecting. Is it the person who is simply walking down the street, or is it the person who will walk down the street if CCTV is in operation? I think it is the latter. In Newcastle, if I walked out of the civic centre and through the city centre and shops for an hour I would be recorded 100 times on CCTV. Reducing its use by 90% would still leave ten such recordings. The majority of people regard CCTV as a positive benefit in making our streets safer. They see it as the 'bobby on the beat'.
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA)
The government recently launched a consultation on councils' use of surveillance powers under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. This is welcome because it will help us to define powers and responsibilities better.
For example, my council's night-time noise complaints' hotline and our efforts to stop fly-tipping are very well regarded. People should not be free to stop their neighbours sleeping night after night, nor should people be free to tip rubbish in public places. So, when we collect evidence, people see a local council doing its job.
There has been understandable criticism of some councils using surveillance to prosecute minor offences, such as dog fouling, and some politicians, particularly in the House of Lords, have called for authorisation to be reserved to magistrates in relation to local authority applications. I do not believe that magistrates should make those decisions. In Newcastle, officers authorised to approve surveillance are very limited in number, are at a senior level and are fully aware of the limitations and constraints of those powers.
The impact of technology
As technology advances we will continue to have discussions on whether some school governing bodies are right to introduce biometrics into schools; I have a natural distaste for introducing children to fingerprinting. I distrust large databases and question whether we are right to have such all-embracing computer systems containing so much private data, in particular the children's database, open to so many people.
New technology should be embraced where it protects individual rights. It should be very carefully examined where the benefit to the individual is unproven.
John Shipley is Leader of Newcastle City Council. He represents Parklands Ward and was first elected as a councillor in May 1975. He is a member of the Northern Way Steering Group and the Northern Way Transport Compact. He was appointed a board member of One North East in December 2005 and is a board member of both the NewcastleGateshead City Development Company and Newcastle Science City Company Ltd. He represents the City Council on a number of other outside bodies including the Theatre Royal Trust. He chairs the Newcastle Partnership (LSP). He worked for over 30 years with The Open University.
From Bubb's Blog
From Whitehall Watch
