Nick Clegg lambasts Brown regime
Nick Clegg, Leader of the UK Liberal Democrats writes about the Damian Green affair in The Telegraph.
His first comment sums up the issue:-
When opposition politicians heard about Damian Green’s arrest, many of us asked ourselves the same question: “When did it become a crime to hold the Government to account?”
Adam’s emphasis.
Clegg highlights various disturbing aspects of the affair, including these:-
The Metropolitan Police says that neither the search nor the arrest were conducted under the provisions of anti-terrorism legislation. Yet nine counter-terrorism officers were required to carry out the arrest of a middle-aged Conservative MP.
The Government has dismissed concerns that counter-terrorism laws can be misused. But time and again we have seen examples of powers that were rushed through Parliament being misused against people for crimes such as heckling Labour ministers at conferences or freezing Icelandic bank accounts.
Even if these laws were not invoked this time, the sight of anti-terrorist police enforcing laws unrelated to terrorism will only confuse the public further.
Again Adam’s emphasis.
Then as part of his concluding paragraphs Clegg notes:-
The Prime Minister must now do three things: he must clearly dissociate himself from the police operation altogether; he must clarify urgently what Home Office civil servants told ministers, and when; and he must instantly end his habit of leaking Whitehall information to secure favourable headlines for his own Government, while ministers now stand idly by as an opposition MP is arrested for seeking to bring Whitehall information to light in the first place
As Clegg notes the hypocrisy is rampant, indeed earlier in his article he wrote about the hypocrisy of:-
New Labour departments in Whitehall clamping down on leaks to opposition politicians when ministers have elevated judicious leaking to the press to an art form.
This whole affair is outrageous.
Related posts by Adam, the most recent first
Damian Green-Similar leak case thrown out by judge
Nick Clegg lambasts Brown regime
Cartoon for Today, Sunday 30 November
Another poke in the eye for freedom
Intimidatory tactics in Green Affair
Nock Clegg and David Cameron need to catch a wake up. Their respective parties have stood by and done nothing whilst laws that allowed this type of action were introduced at the behest of the police and some ministers. If this results in a ’stand’ being taken by the opposition parties and an undertaking to repeal many of the unreasonable and uneccesary laws, then it can be no bad think. We need to re-introduce not just parliamentary democracy, but democracy itself.