Tag Archives: Politics society and law

Australia is playing a dangerous game with Sri Lanka

Leave a Reply

This post was written by Dr Stewart Motha, a Reader in the School of Law. It originally appeared on the Guardian’s Comment is Free on 21 February 2013.

It’s election year in Australia, and that means open season on boat migrants. Last year, 17,000 people arrived by boat, with a massive surge of 6,500 from Sri Lanka. These numbers have an alarming impact on Australia’s human rights record as the government puts in place draconian domestic measures to deal with the increase, and plays a foolhardy game of building military and security links with Sri Lanka to stem the flow.

Harsh measures for dealing with people arriving by boat are nothing new in Australia. The Howard government set the tone in 2001 by mobilising special forces to seize the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa after it rescued more than 400 refugees from a sinking vessel and brought them into Australian waters. The “Pacific solution” was then introduced, whereby outer islands were excised from the Australian territory for the purpose of migration and judicial review. Refugee claimants arriving by boat at excised territories were mandatorily detained and transported to harsh offshore camps administered by Australia in countries such as Nauru – a practice stopped in 2008, but reactivated last August.

The Australian government is now constructing permanent facilities in Nauru to detain boat migrants, and also runs a detention camp in Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. The PNG opposition were in court last week, challenging the legality of the Manus Island detention centre.

The migration amendment (unauthorised maritime arrivals) bill 2012 now seeks to implement the Pacific solution throughout Australia. What was an exception is to become the norm. A new category of “unauthorised maritime arrivals” will discriminate against people on the basis of the mode of their journey to Australia. If you arrive by boat, you face mandatory detention in a harsh and remote place. Travel by plane and you will be able to apply for a protection visa on arrival. Given most maritime arrivals are from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Sri Lanka, the legal regime effectively implements a de facto form of apartheid based on country of origin (and here, let us note that article 3 of the 1951 refugee convention obliges Australia to fulfil its protection obligations without discriminating on the basis of “race, religion, or country of origin”). As such, the migration amendment bill seeks to implement a staggering legal artifice for a nation that claims to walk tall among the civilised.

The Australian government has also introduced the dangerous practice of forced repatriations of people it claims are not refugees (last September, Human Rights Watch documented the torture of Tamil men and women repatriated to Sri Lanka by the UK Border Agency). These people are returned within 72 hours of arrival, and with “screening” taking place offshore, this happens without any provision of legal assistance for the returnees, or transparency in relation to the work of immigration officials. The risk of refoulement – the return of refugees with a right to protection to their persecutors – is increased, thus flouting the fundamental obligation under the refugee convention.

Australia’s extreme measures have been prompted by a curious surge in the number of people arriving by boat from Sri Lanka. In 2012 around 6,500 people made this arduous journey. In the previous year the number of Sri Lankan arrivals was a mere 211. Department of Immigration statistics indicate that 5,215 of the 2012 arrivals were Tamil, and 1,027 Sinhalese. In the last month, the number arriving has dramatically reduced to a trickle. What explains these fluctuations, and what is to be made of the Australian reaction to it?

Earlier this month, the Australian reported that Australia’s intelligence agencies suspected an official with a high profile close to President Mahinda Rajapaksa was “responsible for authorising numerous boats in the past 10 months, fuelling the surge of asylum seekers from Sri Lanka”. The Sri Lankan government has denied the allegations. The suggestion is that Sri Lanka can “turn on the tap” and “unleash untold asylum boats”. Australia has chosen an unreliable security and surveillance partner.

The politics of people smuggling is hardly ever only about the people being trafficked and those exploiting their desperation. Because of its hysterical attitude to those seeking asylum, Australia has potentially walked into the trap of being held hostage by any authoritarian regime that colludes in people smuggling. The currency they will demand is a blind-eye to human rights violations, favourable diplomatic attention and security partnerships.

The Australian minister for foreign affairs, Bob Carr, visited Sri Lanka in December and announced training for Sri Lankan naval officers on surveillance and intelligence gathering. The shadow minister for foreign affairs, Julie Bishop, visited Sri Lanka last month and praised its postwar reconciliation and reconstruction efforts. It’s one thing for Australia to throw the refugee convention out the window, and another to weigh in on issues such as reconciliation and militarisation in another country. If they want to do the former they should do it honestly; the latter is gratuitous, unnecessary and harmful.

As Australians look ahead to the renewal they deserve in an election year, is it not time to imagine a different, better Australia? Let’s not add another episode of “unutterable shame” to Australia’s archive of atrocity. Instead, let Australia summon up the sentiments of Henry Lawson’s iconic 1891 poem, Freedom on the Wallaby, for today it is not the rebel’s blood but a callous disregard for the vulnerable that “stains the wattle”.

Does the jury system work?

Leave a Reply

This piece was contributed by Dr Adam Gearey, a Reader in the School of Law.

Does the discharge of the jury in the Pryce trial suggest that this most ancient of common law institutions has come to the end of the road? The trial judge, Mr Justice Sweeney, was certainly scathing about the failure of the members of the jury to understand basic points of evidence and their role in the trial. It also seems the press are ready to stick the boot in; fulminating against overpaid lawyers who defend the jury trial as a way of justifying fat fees. The point is that we have to take a sober look at these issues, and not listen to the rantings of the gutter press.

The real difficulty is finding an objective way of thinking about the good and bad features of the jury. One way of doing this is by looking at the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (ECtHR). Using Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the court has been busy developing principles that define a fair trial. Given that these are international human rights standards they offer sound principles for thinking about and assessing the work of the jury.

From the perspective of fair trial rights, the jury is – at first regard- deeply problematic. It is a fundamental principle of a fair trial that a decision maker gives reasons for his/her decision. It should then be clear how the law and facts have been interpreted. If the decision maker is wrong, then there may be grounds for an appeal. The jury does not give reasons for its decision.

Does this mean that the jury is fundamentally flawed? This conclusion would be a mistake. A fair trial involves checks and balances. What the Pryce trial shows is that the trial judge himself was able to give jurors directions and guidance- and- when it became clear that the jury was unable to reach a sensible decision, was able to bring the trial to an end.

“Ah”- say the journalists of the gutter press- “the Pryce trial shows that courts are costly and inefficient”; a line of reasoning that always leads to the same kind of conclusion: human rights keep criminals out of prison; stop ‘us’ deporting immigrants etc etc etc.

Step back and think this through.

Whilst the jury is not perfect it is central to the integrity of the criminal trial. Faith in the jury is faith in our fellow citizens to argue about matters and come to a reasonable conclusion. That the jury is also consistent with European human rights law and measures up to an international benchmark is also worth stressing. Jury deliberations may be hidden from scrutiny – a safeguard necessary to allow full and frank discussion of the issues the trial raises- but we should not allow the Pryce trail knock our belief that the jury is central to the criminal trial.

Perhaps, in the final analysis, the Pryce trial shows that the safeguards do work; and that, to the chagrin of the journalists, lawyers are doing their jobs and that – despite some problems – the jury is an integral part of the criminal trial.

Valentine’s Day

15 Replies

This post was contributed by Professor Lynne Segal, Anniversary Professor of Psychology & Gender Studies in the Department of Psychosocial Studies.

Not again? Are you home alone on Valentine’s day, feeling yourself like a miserable old ghost, excluded from the feast of love? If so, you could join up with the ‘one-billion-rising’, the global feminist campaign which, in the footsteps of Eve Ensler seventeen years ago, turned Valentine’s Day into V-Day. Women and men everywhere are being urged to take a stand against violence against women, so often perpetrated through sexual assault. Here the V stands for Victory over men’s Violence against Women. It is a victory that is to be achieved through, among other things, everybody learning to love, instead of hating and abusing, the Vagina. It’s a crucial movement, with rape culture still endemic around the world.

But let me return to my opening question, the thought of being home alone on Valentine’s Day. Are we unlovable if tonight we find ourselves undatable, living alone, outside any couple? Of course not! We all know that there are so many different kinds of love, some might even reflect, like Jeanette Winterson this time last year, that all our relationships are based on love of different kinds: ‘If we could try to experience love as a quality – like compassion or courage – and focus less on love as an event, something that happens, then love would belong to us, rather than being dependent on us belonging to someone’.

In his conversation, In Praise of Love, the philosopher Alain Badiou echoes some of Winterson’s thoughts, though reinstating the couple as the site of ‘love’. Disdaining what he sees, rather oddly, as the ‘risk-free’ commercialization of love in internet dating, Badiou affirms the truth of ‘love’ in the movement from the chance encounter to the challenging commitment of an enduring recognition and acceptance of ‘difference’ between two people, as each negotiates a shared encounter with the world, no longer ‘from the perspective of the One, but from the perspective of the Two’.

Love may indeed be best seen as a quality of commitment, acceptance and enduring negotiation. However there is surely a little more to add when Winterson or Badiou object, as many do, to the commodification of the trade in ‘love’ nowadays, exemplified by those roses and chocolates on Valentine’s Day. This is because, even when free from the taint of commercialism, love is always shadowed by various forms of envy, dread of abandonment, and more, on the one hand; constraint and fears of suffocation, on the other.

This underbelly of love persists, whether we see ‘love’ as a type of event (the expression of desire, the occurrence of sexual activity, the declaration of strong affection); or alternatively, as a quality of lasting attachment and care (trying to be always dependable, supportive, comforting, responsive, in sharing one’s life with another). In a brief meditation on the risks of love the philosopher Judith Butler agrees, when she writes, ‘love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision.’ The archetypal bond of love, that of a child for its mother, conveys it all; soon enough the child will be caught between need and flight, even as the mother was perhaps once caught between fear and flight at the initial total dependence of the infant on her ceaseless ministrations.

We could all love each other more, even that passing stranger, and the world be a better, indeed unrecognizable, place. But who dares ask for love without fear of rejection? It is the horror of the pitying smugness of the securely (or insecurely) coupled that single people experience, especially on Valentine’s Day. Now where exactly can I find those billion people rising, tonight?

Listen to a podcast from the School of Social Sciences, History and Philosopy’s lecture series ‘The Importance of Being Human’ (2011). Professor Lynne Segal and Professor Stephen Frosh discuss : Is love possible?

Reflections On Gay Marriage

6 Replies

This post was contributed by Daniel Monk, Reader in Law, in Birkbeck’s School of Law.

When the result of the House of Commons vote on gay marriage was announced I was surprised not so much by the result – 400 in favour/175 against – but by how moved I was by it.

Full Equality?

If enacted, gay marriage will not add any rights or benefits to those already provided for by the Civil Partnership Act 2004. The marriage rules relating to adultery and consummation (which never applied to civil partnerships) will still not apply to same sex marriage. And Christian gays and lesbians will be prevented from being married by the established Church of England (even if their local clergy wants to). So, while close, it is not full legal equality. And add to this the fact that Prime Minister David Cameron’s support of gay marriage has been seen by many political commentators as an attempt to prove himself to be a moderniser in the run up to the 2015 General Election, a more cautious reaction to the vote might have been in order.

Past injustices

But the reason why it moved me and many other gays and lesbians attests both to the symbolic significance of marriage and to law’s function, too often unacknowledged, as a vehicle for the expression of emotions. Oscar Wilde on being released from Reading Gaol in 1897 is recorded as saying, “Yes, we will win in the end; but the road will be long and red with monstrous martyrdoms”. The overwhelming support for gay marriage by the House of Commons is moving then, not primarily because of what it enables in the future, but because of the perspective it provides for viewing and remembering that long road. For many gay men alive now sex between men was illegal for a major part of their lives and lowering the age of consent to 16 (making it equal for gays and straights) was only achieved in 2000. As an undergraduate student in the 1980s not only was it potentially criminal for me to have any male partners but in family law I read about contemporary cases where lesbians were losing custody of their children simply on the basis of their sexuality. And at the same time the notorious Section 28 in 1986 outlawed the ‘promotion of homosexuality’. In this context the vote for gay marriage, in a bitter sweet way, is experienced as a form of reconciliatory justice, an implicit political acknowledgment and apology for the violence of the law in the past.

Why Marriage?

That marriage has been the vehicle for expressing a commitment to respecting gays and lesbians is not surprising. For those who see analogies between gay rights and the US Black Civil Rights movement, the right to marry (as opposed to entering a civil partnership) is comparable to the right to travel on non-segregated buses. Equal but different simply isn’t good enough. But marriage is a complex institution and its ‘true’ function has always been contested. Gay marriage is only one site of contemporary conflict. Other current debates concern the status of pre-nuptial agreements, the legal distinction between ‘forced’ and ‘arranged’ marriages, and extension of marriage-like rights to cohabitants (conjugal, coupled or otherwise). This broader context opens up the debate to principles other than formal legal equality and reveals alternatives to simply voting for or against gay marriage.

Alternatives

One alternative, which is adopted in many continental countries, is that ‘marriage’ is left totally to the authority of religious bodies and all legal consequences are removed from it, while at the same time opening up civil partnerships to both heterosexuals and non-conjugal relations. One benefit of this is that the rules relating to adultery and non-consummation would not apply to anyone, again a reform adopted in other jurisdictions. Of course this route would require the disestablishment of the Church of England and the separation of Church and State. (Section 3 of the gay marriage Bill refers to the Submission of the Clergy Act 1533; in family law the battle between Church and State goes back a long way!)

A second even bolder alternative would be to leave marriage to religious bodies and to simply dispense with the legal regulation of conjugal couple relationships altogether. This approach asks us to question not ‘why should gays be excluded from marriage’ but ‘why does the State regulate relationships’? This focus requires us to engage seriously with David Cameron’s claim that he supports gay marriage, ‘not despite being a Conservative but because I’m a Conservative’.

These are important questions for the future. But in looking back to the past and fittingly as Birkbeck for the time marks LGBT History Month, gay marriage is unquestionably cause for celebration.

Defence policy for an independent Scotland

1 Reply

This post was contributed by Ron Smith, Professor of Applied Economics in the Department of Economic, Mathematics and Statistics.

Scottish independence is a low probability event, but low probability events like the break-up of the Soviet Union or of Czechoslovakia do happen, so it is sensible to do some contingency planning. The Scottish Affairs Committee of the House of Commons has been examining the defence policy for an independent Scotland as part of its enquiry into The Referendum on Separation for Scotland. Together with Professor Malcolm Chalmers of the Royal United Services Institute I gave evidence to the Committee on January 23.

The Scottish National Party, SNP, has suggested a defence budget for an independent Scotland of around £2.5 billion with armed forces of 15,000 personnel. A comparison with other small countries with populations of around 5m, like Ireland, Norway, Denmark or New Zealand suggests that these are reasonable numbers for steady state spending and armed forces. However, the transition to steady state is likely to be difficult.

The sort of equipment that Scotland might inherit from the UK is unlikely to be appropriate for an independent Scotland. The obvious example is the Trident nuclear deterrent, which is located in Scotland on the Clyde, on which the Scottish Affairs Committee has already reported.

Scotland is likely to follow those other small countries which inherited nuclear weapons on separation. Belarus, Ukraine & Kazakhstan all denuclearised, and that is SNP policy.  They had aid under the US Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program to help them repatriate the weapons to Russia. How one would repatriate Scottish nuclear weapons would be a central issue.

A major problem in the transition is that the military or defence civil servants that Scotland inherits from the UK are likely to have UK preconceptions and a mindset that is inappropriate for a small country like Scotland. They would face the same problems that somebody leaving a large company for a small firm faces. Some of the suggestions that have been made for a possible Scottish force structure reflect that mindset.

Because of the SNP’s commitment to the traditional Scottish regiments, their proposed structure is rather infantry heavy, whereas it is likely that naval and air assets for protection of fisheries and oil fields will be more useful. However the ships and aircraft they might inherit from the UK are not likely to be suitable, so they would need to buy new equipment appropriate for a small country.  Heavy investments in infrastructure may also be needed to provide for command and control, training and intelligence.

My suggestion would be that an independent Scotland should follow the example of the appointment of a Canadian as Bank of England Governor and hire a foreigner. Scotland should bring in a defence planner from somewhere like Ireland, Denmark or New Zealand, who understands how to run the defence of a small country.

The Justice and Security Bill – a threat to open justice

2 Replies

Professor Bill Bowring of Birkbeck Law School, who is also a practising human rights barrister, writes about the potential impact of the controversial Justice and Security Bill.

The Justice and Security Bill, presently going through Parliament, threatens to take Britain back to the 17th century, through the regular use of secret evidence. The Coalition Government intends to expand the use of secret evidence to ordinary civil proceedings. As Liberty has pointed out, enactment of the Bill would be an unprecedented encroachment on the rule of law, and the principles of open and fair trial.

This controversial Bill is a panic reaction to the Labour Government’s defeat in 2010 in the Binyam Mohammed case. Binyam Mohamed was arrested in Pakistan and subjected by the US authorities to ‘extraordinary rendition’. He claimed that a confession that he had been trained by Al-Quaeda had been obtained by torture. Charges against him were dropped, after the US District Court of Columbia vindicated his claim that UK authorities had been involved in and facilitated ill-treatment and torture to which he was subjected while under the control of US authorities. He was released and arrived in the UK on 23 February 2009.

When he claimed damages, the UK Government attempted to exclude the evidence that he had been tortured, despite the fact that this was public knowledge in the US as a result of the judgment. On 10 February 2010 the Court of Appeal dismissed the Labour Government’s appeal against a series of Divisional Court judgments ordering that the Government was not permitted to exclude the information obtained from US sources. Jonathan Sumption QC, who is now a Justice of the Supreme Court, told the Court of Appeal on behalf of the Government that the Divisional Court’s decision was “unnecessary and profoundly damaging to the interests of this country”, and indeed that part of the reasoning of the Divisional Court was “irresponsible”. In fact all the information was already in the public domain.

Binyam Mohamed has now been paid a very large sum in compensation.

The Justice and Security Bill was introduced into the House of Lords on 29 May 2012 by Lord Wallace of Tankerness QC, a Liberal Democrat peer and Advocate General for Scotland. The Bill proposes a new Ministerial power to instigate, by application to the Court, a Closed Material Procedure (CMP), in cases where the Minister considers that disclosure of certain material would be damaging to national security. Until now, CMP has only been available in a very small number of specialist proceedings, such as in relation to “Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures”, and Control Orders. CMP takes place entirely in private; only the judge, the Government’s lawyers and a Special Advocate appointed by the Government for the litigant. The litigant and their lawyers are excluded. Unlike normal legal representatives Special Advocates are unable to disclose material to their ‘client’.

On 21 November 2012 Louise Christian of leading civil liberties solicitors Christian Khan chaired a public meeting at Garden Court Chambers, sponsored by the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers (of which I am International Secretary) and CAMPACC – the Campaign Against Criminalising Communities. The meeting was addressed by the human rights QC Dinah Rose; Richard Norton-Taylor, journalist on defence and security on The Guardian; Clare Algar, Executive Director of Reprieve; and Saghir Hussain Director of CagePrisoners. The theme running through the meeting was that open justice is a central principle of British law, and the right to a fair trial is a centuries-old feature of the common law and is enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights.

I agree with the practising lawyers organised in the Bar Council and the Law Society that secret trials and withholding evidence are the standard practices of repressive regimes. The Bill if enacted will erode core principles of justice. The UK’s international reputation for fair trials will be significantly damaged.

Professor Bowring and Birkbeck Law School work closely with solicitors like Christian Khan, and the barristers at Garden Court, for example in the Law School’s annual week-long event “Law on Trial”.

Building a Media Reform Coalition: Real change for real journalism

Leave a Reply

Justin Schlosberg, Lecturer in journalism and media, in Birkbeck’s Department of Media and Cultural Studies reflects on the forthcoming publication of the Leveson report.

As Leveson’s report into the ethics and standards of the press nears completion, the closure of ranks among the media against any form of real change is intensifying. What we are presented with is a pseudo-choice between self or statutory regulation. What we end up with will most likely be a reformed Press Complaints Commission (PCC) with some kind of notional statutory underpinning. But it will be decried as an open door to state intrusion not seen since the repeal of censorship and stamp duties.

A lack of accountability

In the midst of this fervour, it may be forgotten that Hackgate was first and foremost about institutional corruption of the gravest order between the media, police and politicians of all colours, which testimony to the inquiry has underlined. The result has been a media that is not adequately accountable and does not do its job of holding others to account adequately.

The press themselves have sought to emphasise that the problem facing Lord Leveson is solely to do with the behaviour and ethics of (some) journalists. Even within this narrow framework, there have been increasing complaints that his remit is too wide and not appropriate to the extent of the problem; that British journalism is, on the whole, a robust and vigorous defender of the public interest. Within this narrative, the Guardian in particular is hailed as the champion of a pluralised press that can deliver accountability of itself.

But a genuinely democratic and accountable media system cannot be upheld by one or two titles with relatively minor readerships. What’s more, these titles have failed comprehensively to promote public interest journalism in other areas. For instance, the Guardian’s disastrous handling of Cablegate in 2010 (the series of US diplomatic cables released in partnership with WikiLeaks) resulted in stories about Gadaffi’s mistresses gaining more prominence than those about the Government undermining the Iraq Inquiry to protect US interests, or misleading Parliament over the banning of cluster bombs.

The real problem for democracy is not so much that bad journalism gets published, but rather that good journalism often doesn’t.  Finding alternative ways to regulate press ethics will deal only with a marginal and surface symptom of a much broader disease that has seen the space for real, professional journalism in the public interest progressively diminish. It’s about decades of unchecked concentration of media power and a resurgence of press baronism; it’s about structural declines in circulation exacerbated by the migration of readers and advertisers online; and it’s about incessant closures and cutbacks to operational journalism across all platforms and sectors, but most acutely affecting those areas central to the media’s democratic role: investigative and local journalism.

The issue of press ownership

Consequently, Lord Leveson could only do justice to his original remit (which includes examination of broader issues to do with media plurality) by addressing the ownership and funding of news in conjunction with press ethics. Specifically, by introducing media ownership thresholds that trigger public interest obligations and/or divestment; and by recommending new ways to fund and support journalism that serves the public interest over profit. Crucially, he should not allow the ownership question to be side-lined because of technicalities. Media concentration is notoriously difficult to both measure and apply remedies to. But this is not a reason for abandoning policy altogether and there are certainly historical and contemporary precedents elsewhere on which to base a renewed approach to ownership regulation; one that takes into account the emergence of new oligopolists in the digital domain, whilst acknowledging the enduring capacity of legacy media to dominate public conversation.

It is precisely this capacity which has enabled the whole issue of ownership regulation to be marginalised from the debate. It has fostered a view of new rules as unrealistic or unfeasible which has found its way into the discourse of politicians and even campaigners who are nonetheless committed to substantive reform. The press has opted to engage these voices on its own terms, allowing editors to espouse a sense of libertarian defiance whilst continuing to dance to the strings of their owner-bosses.

It is unlikely that Lord Leveson will seize this opportunity to redress the balance and make a genuine difference to media plurality and freedom. And even if he did, it is even less likely that the government will act upon his recommendations with the prospect of a general election looming. It is telling that even those, like Peter Preston, who acknowledge the enduring fear of politicians to contravene the will of the press, at the same time emphatically demand that the press be left alone. Yet the fear of politicians – exemplified by Labour’s recent recoiling from earlier calls for ownership caps – should itself be a warning sign for Leveson.

Media regulation?

Politicians will not be able to counter the dominant narrative emerging from a closing of ranks among the press without a concerted mobilisation of grassroots pressure. An IPPR poll six months ago suggested that a sizeable majority of the public support both statutory regulation of the press, and limits on media ownership. Regardless of what Leveson recommends, now is the time to establish and expand a movement for change that gives voice to this silent majority.

There are perhaps few issues that provoke a broader spectrum of opinion than media regulation. Familiar lines between left and right become blurred and no one seems to agree on what is really meant by media plurality, freedom or the public interest.  In his calls for evidence in regards to media reform proposals, Leveson has unwittingly induced a focus on difference rather than core common principles.

But there is certainly a clear majority support among reformers for a new regulatory framework that has both statutory underpinning and representation from working journalists as opposed to just editors. Equally, there is a wide consensus that something needs to be done about the concentration of media ownership which has fostered the kind of awkward and insidious relationships between media and political elites so vividly exposed by the Leveson hearings.

A media reform coalition is seeking to build on these core principles and engage broad support for real change in favour of real journalism. It has emerged from a cross section of civil society and campaigning groups including Hacked Off, Avaaz, the National Union of Journalists, 38 Degrees and the Coordinating Committee for Media Reform. Together, these groups are mobilising for a public lobbying of Parliament on the 29 November – when the Leveson Report is expected to be published. It will demonstrate the cross-section of public support for reform that goes beyond a new name for the PCC, and for new laws that will promote a genuinely democratic and accountable media.

Austerity under Thatcher and the Coalition: the second time as tragedy

1 Reply

By Professor Deborah Mabbett, who will be delivering her inaugural lecture this evening, 8 November 2012.

In 1979, a new government came to power in Britain determined to rein in public spending and set the economy on a new path led by private innovation and enterprise. Sound familiar? There are certainly some parallels between the Thatcher government and the current Coalition, but there are also some puzzling differences. Take social security. Both tried, or are trying, to cut back this unloved area of government spending, but their cuts are quite different. Thatcher cut back the state pension, but more or less maintained the safety net of means-tested benefits. The Coalition has targeted many parts of the means-tested system for cuts, while the state pension is to be protected with a ‘triple lock’: indexed to the best of wages, prices or 2.5%. Thatcher’s policy was based on the philosophy that the state should provide a minimal, residual safety net, and the private sector would do the rest. But what philosophy guides the Coalition’s pattern of cuts?

The answer shows something important about the relationship between the government and the financial services sector. Under Thatcher, this sector was not only the great hope for the deindustrialised British economy; it also had a key role to play in privatising welfare. Council tenants exercising their right to buy would get their mortgages from the newly-liberalised building societies, while workers would entrust their pension contributions to investment funds which held out the promise of good returns, albeit reduced by large fees.  Twenty-five years on, the government was forced into a dramatic bailout of the financial system. Less noticed, it is also locked into supporting privatised welfare in expensive ways.

Problems with privatised pensions have been apparent: mis-selling, fraud and high fees have afflicted the sector. The government’s response has been to tighten the regulatory framework, while continuing to encourage contributions with generous tax incentives. Regulation was the price of making finance the agent of the government’s plans: private pensions had to be made to work, and if they didn’t, the government would step in to ‘correct’ the market.  Regulation was seen as a burden by the financial sector, but it could also be costly for the government, as the Equitable Life case showed. Equitable Life made commitments to its policyholders that it was unable to honour: the government ended up having to compensate policy-holders for ‘a decade of regulatory failure’. The failings of private sector agents could come back to bite the government.

Indexing the state pension only to prices meant that it failed to keep up with rising living standards. This was intentional: the idea was that private pension provision would expand to fill the gap. For those who lacked a private pension top-up, means-tested benefits were available. However, the rise of means-testing conflicted with the aim of expanding private provision, because workers can contribute to a pension scheme and then find that state benefits are reduced. While successive governments tried to mitigate the effects with various allowances and tapers, it remained the case that pension contributions could bring a very small return in increased retirement income.

The decision to adopt ‘automatic enrolment’ made it a necessity to do something to restrain means-testing. This policy aims to boost private pensions by relying on workers to accept ‘defaults’ in market transactions rather than actively evaluating their options. The problem with this type of ‘nudge’ is that the nudger must be quite sure that the default is in the interests of the worker. In short, the government must make private pensions pay. The triple lock on the state pension is one step towards this, as it should slow down the growth of means-testing.

Is there any alternative? A much larger compulsory state scheme would avoid many of the problems with private pensions, but apparently that is politically untenable. What makes it so is the continued power of the financial services sector. Privatisation does not stand for individual autonomy and choice – the contributing worker is a passive figure in pensions policy. Instead, privatisation stands for making policies for the financial services sector, protecting its role in provision. The result is inefficiency and expense, complex regulation and a high risk that the government picks up the tab in the end.

The Thatcher government sowed the seeds of a private welfare sector, and the Coalition has reaped an unwelcome harvest. Privatising welfare has locked government and finance into a tight embrace which neither desired but neither can bear to leave.

Watch the “P is for politics” video series produced by our Department of Politics.