7 December 1999
The New York Times, December 7, 1999
By Anthony Lewis
In a book on a long-running civil conflict, the author briefly describes how his government uses surveillance systems to trace suspected enemies of the state. He is arrested, charged with a serious crime, his house ransacked and papers seized.
Did this happen in China, or perhaps Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore? No, it happened in Tony Blair's Britain. It is an astonishing story, and it discloses a dirty little secret: The Blair government has authoritarian instincts.
The author is Tony Geraghty, a respected journalist who was the star defense correspondent of The Sunday Times of London in its glory days and has since written half a dozen books. This one is "The Irish War," about the centuries of conflict in and about Ireland.
A year ago this month, six Ministry of Defense police officers appeared at Mr. Geraghty's home on the Welsh border, searched it, seized a mass of his papers and arrested him. He is charged with violating the Official Secrets Act by publishing material given him without authority by an official. The maximum penalty is two years in prison.
What the Blair government apparently objects to is five or six pages in a long, serious book. Those pages say that the British government has computer systems that work with cameras and microphones to keep track of suspected I.R.A. terrorists.
The book is a straight, highly professional account of the Irish conflict, not at all skewed toward the I.R.A. Nor could anyone doubt Mr. Geraghty's British patriotism. During the gulf war, when he was 58, he volunteered for duty in the Royal Air Force.
Ministry of Defense representatives visited HarperCollins, a publishing firm owned by Rupert Murdoch. It had planned a paperback edition of "The Irish War" but postponed publication indefinitely after the visit.
"It is a surrealistic experience," Mr. Geraghty said when I telephoned him, "to find that Cromwell's style of government has returned to England -- a determination to quash anything that looks like dissidence.
"The system in Northern Ireland is to penetrate your target's entire life. That's fine if you're stopping bombers. But the surveillance machine, for want of employment, is now increasingly being turned on Britons at home. The British population is now the most intensely surveilled in the world. The terrorist's loss of privacy is progressing to the ordinary citizen's."
The prosecution must prove that Mr. Geraghty, who for the moment is free on bail, damaged national security. But the damage need only be minuscule, because the statute does not balance it against a public interest in openness.
When the Official Secrets Act was revised in 1989, the Labor Party and Tony Blair, then in opposition, proposed an amendment to include such a public-interest element. It was defeated. Now Prime Minister Blair evidences little sympathy for what Americans would call First Amendment rights -- or other civil liberties.
In a speech not long ago Mr. Blair said he was sick of "libertarian nonsense masquerading as freedom." His home secretary, Jack Straw, ridiculed civil liberties lawyers as people "who get into their BMW's and drive off to posh suburbs."
Labor's election platform promised a freedom of information act. Mr. Straw has introduced a bill giving the government so much power to prevent release of information that a number of Labor members of Parliament are threatening to vote against it.
Mr. Straw also has a bill to deprive many criminal defendants of the right to trial by jury. And an anti-terrorism bill targeting, among others, anyone who seeks to overthrow a foreign government -- as many anti-apartheid campaigners in Britain did for years.
The Blair government, commendably, has acted to bring the protections of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law. But in his own actions, The Economist wrote, Mr. Blair has acted as if he had "a license to trample down civil liberties."
The prosecution of Tony Geraghty is plainly designed to intimidate those who would disclose official policy or criticize it. And the intimidation seems to be working. HarperCollins caved in. And the British press has had relatively little to say on Mr. Geraghty's behalf. The case is a test of how much people care, and will dare, for liberty.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company