Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil rights group Liberty and omnipresent media personality, is on the cover of her book. She’s wearing a blindfold bearing the legend ‘On Liberty’, which seems to cast her in the role of Justice — blind, and all that. The title is the same as John Stuart Mill’s famous essay on the subject, which is, I’d say, unwise, as inviting comparisons. I did indeed go out to get JSM’s essay to read alongside Shami, and it wasn’t just the prose that left her standing.
This book is an account of her time at Liberty since she started there, the day before 9/11, with a bit of autobiography thrown in. It’s an uneasy combination because the personal stuff is minimal and chiefly to do with her work (she has a son, which gives her empathy for ‘my fellow mothers’ when she visits a crime-ridden estate) and the story of Liberty is an account of one campaign after another, enlivened by her own views.
I should say that Shami, from this and from the single time I met her, is a nice woman and patently means us all well, though mostly in a cross way. Many of her and Liberty’s causes are good ones; the campaigns against prolonged pre-trial detention and ID cards, for instance, are ones where lots of Spectator readers will probably be on the same side; certainly she’s found herself next to David Davis MP more than once in the trenches, and they made friends.
But she has a remarkable habit of equating her own views with what is right; she is infallibly her own yardstick and moral compass. I recall hearing a radio interview with her in the wake of the Leveson Report on press regulation — she was one of the assessors advising Lord Leveson, though this doesn’t feature here — in which she was cross-questioned about her support for his main recommendations and whether this quite squared with the freedom of the press. How, she asked indignantly, could you possibly imagine that I, Shami Chakrabarti, could ever lend my support to something that was not compatible with freedom? I paraphrase, obviously, but I remember thinking at the time that this isn’t quite good enough; what Shami regards as right isn’t necessarily what is right. And that assumption, that her world view is the moral and probably the only approach to tricky questions about freedom and responsibility, invests this entire book.
By way of contrast, can we turn to John Stuart Mill? The original essay, On Liberty, is, among other things, about the necessity for plural debate, for taking absolutely nothing for granted, but holding all our dearest assumptions up for rational scrutiny, especially those views that run counter to the prejudices of the age:
Protection against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs to be protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development… of any individuality not in harmony with its ways.
And each age has its own non-conformists — in Mill’s day it was religious sceptics while ours might include smokers and opponents of gay marriage. But where Mill makes us re-examine every one of our prejudices, Shami is merely certain about hers. If you, for example, nurse doubts about the extent of immigration or possible abuses of asylum then, sorry, you’re not really nice.
And whereas Mill, like Cardinal Newman, took the trouble on principle to put his opponents’ point of view more clearly and persuasively than they could themselves, Shami simply goes in for the reductio ad absurdum approach. She is obviously opposed to the Tories’ bid to replace the Human Rights Act with a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, which is fine; lots of judges have similar reservations. But for Shami, ‘This is an attempt to redefine our fundamental rights as citizens’ privileges. This is nothing short of the road to Guantanamo Bay.’ Really?
Or, to take a less divisive issue, what about her categorical opposition to police retaining the DNA of people they arrest? It meant that, for instance, the DNA profile of Damian Green MP ended up on a police database. She’s prepared to accept that taking samples from someone arrested on suspicion of a serious offence is OK if it’s to do with the investigation. But for the police routinely to collect genetic material from those they arrest, even if they are not convicted — that’s not OK.
It’s dandy to take that approach; lots of libertarians do. But there’s no space here for the fact that there have been arrests and convictions of criminals on the back of DNA samples taken by the police in dealing with quite different offences. I used to keep cuttings about them: violent offenders identified because their DNA had been kept, not destroyed. Me, I think that real but abstract concerns about genetic privacy pale beside the desirability of identifying rapists and murderers who infringe our liberties in very personal ways — but for Shami the case for retention doesn’t even register. She’s just indignant that most DNA the police kept came from black men.
Rather to her surprise, she has made friends as director of Liberty with people on the right and left. Her hero-worship of Gareth Peirce is predictable; her reference to ‘my friend Melanie Phillips’, the right-wing pundit, less so. She can’t stick Tony Blair and found successive Labour home secretaries hard work. In some cases, she was right. David Blunkett once took her to a rundown estate plagued by young thugs in an attempt to persuade her of the merits of Asbos. But, as she sensibly pointed out, what was obvious was that people there were committing serious criminal offences, and should have been prosecuted, not given a bloody Asbo.
She’s less forthcoming about other allies. She’s lyrical about Liberty’s commendable campaign against asymmetric extradition to the US without ever mentioning that, in the case of the unfortunate autistic youth Gary McKinnon, the single most effective opponent of the government was the Daily Mail.
Sometimes her habit of equating her prejudices with what is right can lead her into very dodgy territory. She rightly observes that ‘there have to be limits to freedom and tolerance’ but her example is:
When our church offers adoption services to the wider public, or when we convert our home into a B&B, we do not get to discriminate against people of different faith, race, gender or sexuality. This is about whether we are hurting, as opposed to offending, other people.
Yet on the back of this very principle, Catholic adoption agencies were obliged to close because they had a principled preference for placing children with married heterosexuals rather than gay couples. Shami’s willingness to argue for the crushing of the rights of conscience is pretty shocking.
If the polemic is heavy going, so too is the writing. Honestly, if it’s a toss-up between these two essays on liberty, I’d go for the one from 1859: it’s more pertinent to our time.
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