Well, this is another fine mess. You can do two sensible things with control orders: abolish them or keep ’em. The government has boldly tried to find a third way: keeping them but giving them a new name so people think that there’s been some real change. In general there has not. If you were opposed to control orders I can’t see how you can support TPIMS. And if you supported control orders then you can, I think, make a case that they were more effective, and certainly easier to explain, than their pseudo-replacement.
So, heckuva job, Dave’n’Nick. You’ve come up with a “compromise” that is barely a compromise at all and leaves everyone unhappy. Since ministers clearly felt the case for maintaining control orders was stronger than they had appreciated while they were in opposition it would have been wiser to just say so, rather than hum and haw and pretend that they were changing policy when they have not in fact done so. A u-turn, if executed properly, is at least decisive and doesn’t have to invite ridicule the way ths fudge properly does.
John McTernan offers the pro-control order side of the debate here, arguing that the government has decreased public safety. And he makes a good case – certainly in terms of the politics of the matter. And yes, civil liberties campaigners can sometimes be too sanctimonious for their own good. But that doesn’t make them wrong. Indeed, the best of the pro-control order team acknowledge, essentially, that the libertarians are right but argue that, occasionally, pressing security interests trump traditional considerations of justice and liberty.
And anyway, we are told, it’s just a handful of people. So while we may not like it, we shouldn’t be too worried. Fine again. But if the argument is that we shouldn’t worry about the principle because the practice only affects eight people then that is, implicitly, a concession of the principle. At what point do the numbers begin to matter: 80? 800?
So it seems that the case for control orders relies upon them only being used in the most exceptional of exceptional circumstances. But what happens if there’s a surge in the number of exceptionally exceptional cases? Paradoxically, then, you reach a position in which you can only justify control orders if you almost never use them. Which is another way of highlighting how unsatisfactory they are.
Comments