Life without privacy is intolerable. Behind the Iron Curtain and in Mao Tse-tung’s China people lived in constant dread that anything they said would be recorded or reported, even by close family members. The best way to survive was not merely to say nothing but to think nothing, too. That was the grim success of state terror.
In the past week our growing awareness of the extent of surveillance in the United Kingdom has invited comparison with the former East Germany. In fact there is little similarity – for now at least. The British state does not forbid political debate nor stifle dissent.
However, even where the motivation is not political, depriving a person of privacy still renders their life miserable. In Britain those who have so far found themselves in that position are victims not so much of MI5 as of the press.
Yet there has been little public concern because those who are violated are often celebrities – for example, members of the royal family. Those who occupy the limelight (even if only because they are unwittingly born into it) are widely thought to deserve all that is coming to them.
Most of us would be devastated if we had to endure for a day or two what such people experience on a daily basis. For instance, if the transcripts of our telephone calls were printed in newspapers – as the Prince of Wales’s once were – which of us would not regret things that we had said, believing the conversation was private?
A recent book on press intrusion has even shocked many journalists because it reveals that access to our bank accounts and telephone records can easily be bought by unscrupulous investigators. Quite often someone who is not a celebrity but who strays into the public gaze for 15 minutes of infamy finds his or her private life exposed to criticism and ridicule. Because attention moves on quickly to other people and things, we never know what lasting damage has been caused.
In the rumpus over the bugging of an MP’s conversation with a constituent detained in prison we should not conclude that the biggest current threat to our privacy comes from the state. For the time being it does not. Our media will always be vigilant on our behalf against government encroachment into our lives. But none is likely to defend us from intrusion by other organs of the media.
Nor is the danger confined to the media. Today shops openly sell spy equipment. It is not difficult for people to penetrate our lives in order to steal our identities, blackmail us or simply make our lives hell.
The government does not take the issue seriously, perhaps because it is embarrassed at having massively extended the reach of its own surveillance. Its own carelessness with our personal data demonstrates that it does not grasp what damage can be done when sensitive personal material is diverted.
We viewed the communist regimes of Europe with both horror and amusement. It was not only monstrous that vast numbers of citizens had their conversations recorded, it was also ludicrous.
Eavesdropping on such a scale was a symptom of an inefficient state. How many people were employed typing transcripts? Who had time to read the volumes of material produced, let alone make judgments about their significance? At what economic cost were thousands or millions of workers switched to spy on each other?
It is in that area that the comparison with modern Britain is more apt. Now that about 800 public agencies have the right to carry out surveillance, the British state is evidently mushrooming. For the moment it is at least as comic as it is sinister.
The issue about recording the conversation of Sadiq Khan, the MP, with Babar Ahmad is precisely about whether the surveillance process is properly controlled. Apparently ministers had not given their consent and did not know of it. Evidently, then, the system works badly.
Much nonsense has been written that MPs should not be placed above the law. The real points are quite different. First, constituents with serious problems and often justified grievances against government agencies will worry, reasonably or not, about speaking to their MP if they think the conversation might be bugged.
Second, any government finds a number of MPs a real nuisance because they ask awkward questions. The public relies on MPs to do just that. So we need safeguards against the executive using bugging as a way to discredit its political opponents.
The best guarantee is to require the prime minister personally to authorise any interception against an MP. That can be effective because prime ministers still fear cross-examination in parliament and are reluctant to tell a blatant lie in case it is later found out.
Democracy does not function if ministers can answer in every case that things occurred without their knowledge and beyond their control. Then nobody is accountable. Recently ministers have pleaded ignorance about almost everything that matters: financing scandals in the Labour party, the lost records of 25m child benefit claimants and now the bugging of Khan.
Indeed, ministers have responded to the public’s declining trust in politicians by arranging to know about and decide upon ever fewer issues. They subcontract an ever larger number of decisions to quangos and committees of experts.
If the public thinks that this improves the quality of decision-making, it is wrong. Politicians may be slimy or mendacious, but at least they are public figures operating in the glare of publicity.
The experts to whom they devolve the decisions they fear to take are often little more than jumped-up vested interests operating behind closed doors. They do not fear accountability as ministers must. If voters understood their own interests better, they would demand that every decision of consequence be taken by a minister and that all the paraphernalia of anonymous decision-making bodies be dismantled.
To make matters worse, ministers’ fear of parliament is declining. The scandal over MPs’ allowances further diminishes the public’s respect for the House of Commons. The cry goes up that the house must cease to regulate itself.
It is easy to see that self-governance has not been a total success – to put it mildly. Nonetheless the house is much more transparent than it used to be and more transparent than other institutions are today: MPs now declare their outside interests, for example.
Do journalists or broadcasters reveal what financial interests may have helped to shape their views? Having moved from one camp to the other, I can say that it is a great relief no longer to have to tell the public exactly how I earn my living.
The Commons needs to reform much more and do it quickly. But our democracy rests upon parliament being sovereign. If MPs are merely state employees, and if the executive can tell them what to do, then parliament will surrender that sovereignty and we the public will be the principal losers.
For instance, it is understandably awkward for MPs to have to vote on their own salaries. They loathe the bad press that it brings them. But still it is extraordinary that most are ready to accept instead that the government should dictate their pay. If the executive directs parliament, then the relationship upon which our representative democracy is based will be inverted. The government should depend on parliament, not the other way around.
Of course the executive is happy to see parliament weakened, to change it from being its boss to being its client. Although Gordon Brown and David Cameron appreciate better than the Speaker that Commons reform is urgent, we should not trust them because their interest is to give the executive an easier ride.
In a surveillance society, life would be unbearable. Neither the government nor the media will protect us against its development. Parliament provides our best defence. We must hope, against the odds, that it can autonomously bring its standards up to date. We need it to retain responsibility for its own affairs. We depend upon its remaining sovereign.
Simon Jenkins is away
