I blame David Davis

On the 12th June 2008, the Conservative opposition front bench spokesperson on Home Affairs did something very unexpected. He resigned his seat as an MP.

The reason he gave for this was to spark a national debate on the issue of civil liberties which is an issue close to his heart. He fought the ensuing by-election on this issue and won with 72% of the vote (albeit on a 34% turnout).

But the net result of this somewhat inexplicable action is that from the day he resigned to this David Davis has been a backbench MP. He would have been a shoo-in for Home Secretary in 2010 had he simply remained in post.

His decision to give up that front bench position is thrown into sharp relief by recent events. The Home Secretary Theresa May has released a draft bill which seeks to allow the authorities powers to intercept pretty much any and all communications between citizens of this country. It is more authoritarian than anything Labour dared propose I'm this area and would be a fundamental change in the relationship between the people of this country and the government. It is exactly the sort of thing that Davis was hoping would not happen when during the 2009 Convention on Modern Liberty he implored his party to "keep my promises".

It is thanks to Nick Clegg's diligent actions behind the scenes that this bill is only in draft form and hence can be debated and modified. I know that the parliamentary Lib Dems led by the impeccably civil liberty credentialed Julian Huppert will fight tooth and nail to ensure this bill is consistent with the party's principles.

But it will be a difficult battle. The starting proposition is a terribly illiberal piece of work and May has already set the terms of the debate with talk of how we need this bill to deal with terrorists and paedophiles and how we have nothing to fear if we have nothing to hide. Exactly the sort of thing we used to hear from Labour authoritarians.

Imagine how much easier this battle would have been if the Conservative Home Secretary had been someone whose political identity was very strongly linked with liberty. In fact I'd go further than that and suggest the draft bill would never even have been published. I suspect Davis would have strangled it at birth or his civil servants would never have even tried to suggest it in the first place.

The fact he is not in that position is entirely his own fault. He voluntarily gave up his chance at being the minister who decides these things to instead be one of the muted voices on the sidelines.

That quixotic decision just over 4 years ago has led to the situation we now find ourselves in. At the time I could not fathom what Davis thought he was going to achieve and the intervening period has if anything made it even less explicable.

And the strangest thing of all is that I'm far from sure David Davis himself truly understands what he was trying to achieve.




This post was first published on Dale & Co.

Why did I trust David Davis on liberty?

Two years ago I attended a day long event in London called "The Convention on Modern Liberty".

It was bustling with activists and politicians from various parties and had a number of interesting debates in the main hall and in fringe meetings. The theme was civil and other liberties and one of the leading lights of the event was Conservative MP David Davis. He had become something of a darling of the liberty movement following his resignation from the Shadow Cabinet and forcing of a by-election on the issue of detention without trial and liberty more generally.

Indeed such was his high profile that he gave the closing speech of the event. I remember it well. It was littered with calls to arms for those of us who strongly believe in liberty and freedom in this country. There was a particularly memorable passage where he castigated the then Justice minister Jack Straw for his authoritarian stance on issues such as ID cards.

So it was particularly disappointing in the last few days to see him joining forces with Straw to lead a parliamentary campaign to deny the rights of any prisoners to have the vote. For me, the issue of votes for prisoners and someone's reaction to this is indicative of how liberal or authoritarian and reactionary they are. It is not an easy issue. The tabloid press have a very clear view on this issue and are on a hair trigger ready to publish headlines like "MP WANTS MURDERERS TO HAVE THE VOTE". Local opposition parties to MPs will also be hovering over the leaflet software with similar headlines. And of course public opinion in this country is quite strongly against such an idea at the moment.

Now have a look at the speech David Davis made at the Convention two years ago. These sections in particular leaped out at me when I re-read it:

We’ll have to fight the principle of expedience every time. It sounds easy does it not? Actually sometimes you will find you are on the unpopular side. I repeat ID cards, 42 days, control orders, DNA databases, all popular when they started. But we won the arguments. You won the arguments and we have to win those arguments time and again over and over.

.....

Lincoln once said ‘to sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men’. This is not going to be easy: it is not going to be straightforward . We are all here with people who agree with us: they don’t all agree with us out there. It is not matter if the case is difficult. If the argument is unpopular and if your opponent is intimidating we have to fight it time and again.

He was right. The causes of liberty are often unpopular. I'm sure I will get a fair bit of stick for having published this blog post for example. However I didn't think when I heard David Davis utter those words that within two years he would be one of the "intimidating opponents" that those who value liberty are going to keep having to fight "time and again".

I think the thing that annoys me the most about the vote in the Commons yesterday (which passed by 232 votes to 22, a crushing margin) is how blunt it is. No prisoners, under any circumstances should have the vote. Ever.

Before anyone starts asking me if I want Ian Huntley to have the vote, or others murderers, paedophiles, or rapists the answer is no. I do not agree with giving all prisoners the vote whatever the circumstances. I do however think part of the reintegration into society of those who are in prison under some circumstances should include being able to cast a ballot. I think it would help some feel more like a citizen of the country and help with their rehabilitation. We should bear in mind that the prison population is made up predominantly of the most marginalised in society. Should we really be taking the vote away from people who have committed minor offences? They have already lost their freedom and are banged up for 23 hours a day.

Winston Churchill once famously wrote that you can judge a country by how it treats its prisoners. Well in this case, 100 years on from when he wrote that our parliament with a crushing majority has decided to keep all prisoners disenfranchised under any and all circumstances.

And one of the main cheerleaders for this has been David Davis. The former Conservative darling of the liberty circuit, lauded by Shami Chakrabarti and feted as a voice of reason on this from the right. No more. Having joined forces with his erstwhile authoritarian enemy he has shown his true colours when it really counts on an issue that divides those with true liberal credentials from those who are just play-acting.

It is now clear which camp Mr Davis falls into.

Has David Davis' time come?

Chris Grayling continues to make headlines for all the wrong reasons, most recently due to comments he made about how B&B owners should have the right to turn away gay couples.

This follows other problems Grayling has caused such as his initial reaction to the news that General Dannatt was going to be a Tory adviser (he misunderstood and thought he was going to be a Labour adviser and hence questioned whether it was a gimmick) and misusing violent crime statistics leading to a rebuke from the UK Statistics Authority.

Can David Cameron really afford to keep someone like this in such a sensitive position? There are rumours that he will not now be appointed Home Secretary should the Tories win a majority but if that is the case, Cameron should be straight with us and move him now before the election.

I would suggest that there is an eminently suitable candidate waiting in the wings. David Davis was widely considered a very strong Shadow Home Secretary until he abruptly quit the role in 2008 to fight a by-election on the issue of civil liberties. He is respected throughout the Commons and would surely be an asset to Cameron. It would also show that the Tory leader is pragmatic enough to have another big beast alongside him and not to hold grudges for any perceived problems Davis caused with his controversial decision to fight the by-election.

So I think Cameron needs to either back his current Shadow Home Secretary and make it clear that is who we would be getting in that post if he wins a majority, or appoint a replacement for which I would suggest Davis is the front-runner.

I personally think Davis' time has come.

Why are the Tories not using David Davis more?

It is now widely acknowledged that the Conservative election campaign is struggling. They have had several "wobbly" weeks since the start of the year with Cameron seeming unsure about the implementation of some of his own policies, dodgy statistics being used in a number of publications and most recently the Ashcroft problems amongst other problems.

At the same time, Labour are showing their electoral mettle by sending in attack dogs like Mandelson and Prescott whenever they need someone to go at the opposition. And it seems to be working for them. We also have very strong media performers like Nick Clegg and Vince Cable from the Lib Dems.

One thing I just cannot understand is why David Davis has not been called to get involved with the front-line of the electoral fight. He was a very effective Shadow Home Secretary and is a strong political street-fighter. He would surely do a better job batting for his side than some of the non-entities we see put up in front of the media by the Tories at the moment.

Maybe it's because Cameron still feels slighted about how Davis stood down from the shadow cabinet to fight a by-election on the issue of civil liberties. I must admit I still find that decision a bit odd, almost quixotic but frankly Cameron cannot afford to harbour grudges like this. Maybe he could when he was 20 points in the lead but with the polls showing anywhere from a 7 to possibly even 2 point lead he needs his strongest troops up front with him.

Cameron should not leave Davis languishing on the backbenches.

Why are Liberal Democrats dismissed so readily?

This blog post was originally published in December last year but my readership figures were low at that time and I thought I would give it another outing:

I have just read this post on the Coffee House Spectator blog by James Forsyth which is an interesting post about the possibility of David Davis returning to the shadow cabinet. I think this would be a good development as I have posted about earlier.

However there is an example in the article of something that I have noticed quite a lot of recently. That is to dismiss Lib Dems out of hand as being irrelecant or just not very good apparently by definition of them being Lib Dems. The particular bit is this:

Dominic Grieve was impressive in the Commons yesterday but he has failed to cut through in the media. He was outperformed on Newsnight the other night by Chris Huhne which is rather like being the second tallest mountain in Holland.

So Chris Huhne is dismissed out of hand as not being a worthy debating opponent. There is no attempt to define why this should be, it is just assumed that a Tory should be better than a Lib Dem and the fact that Grieve was "outperformed" is seen an an aberration. The truth is of course that Huhne is one of the best politicians of his generation and has huge experience both as an MP and MEP and also in business.

I have seen this attitude often on many of the more partisan blogs especially in the comments sections (e.g. Iain Dale, Guido etc.). Lib Dems are dismissed as an irrelevance or an annoyance.

This frustrates me hugely for a number of reasons:

1. The Lib Dems in my opinion have a great many excellent MPs among their ranks. I would argue that they have most talent proportional to their size of the 3 major political parties in the Commons. People of the calibre of Vince Cable, Chris Huhne, David Laws, Evan Harris, Norman Lamb, Norman Baker, Susan Kramer and Ming Campbell. And I could go on. Frankly most of that list are better than much of the current cabinet and shadow cabinet. It is ridiculous to try and dismiss us with these levels of talent.
2. We often lead the way in terms of policy formation with the other parties initially attacking us (or dismissing us - see any sort of a pattern here) and then a few months later our proposals get adopted and pretty soon they are in the mainstream. I am certain that if we did not exist as a political force then there would be a lot less pressure for these sorts of policies to be adopted by the other two parties. We are far from an irrelevance.
3. Members and supporters of the other two parties act as if the status quo of power flipping between the two of them periodically is just the way it is. They often try to persuade voters to vote for them as a means of keeping the other one out. I recall Tony Blair doing this during the 2005 election warning that a vote for the Lib Dems could let the Tories in by "the back door". Well quite aside from the completely anti-democratic connotations associated with not voting for who you want to because the electoral system might hand the seat to someone you want less (which I have and will continue to post about), the status quo may not be there for ever. It is possible that after the next election, if Labour is defeated quite heavily that they start to implode and within another few years the Lib Dems could end up as the official opposition. It has happened in other countries. Labour and the Tories do not have a divine right to be in positions 1 and 2 in this respect and they and their supporters would do well to remember this. There is also of course the possiblity (quite likely judging by current polls) of there being a hung parliament after the next election. If that happens then all bets are off for how politics pans out over the next few years.

David Cameron will not keep the promises of David Davis

As I blogged about back in March, David Davis made an impassioned speech during The Convention on Modern Liberty where he pleaded with his own party to "keep my promises". There is an mp3 of his speech available here and a transcript of it here. A key section is:

Please look at every law you pass, every law you pass, and study it so that it gives freedom, privacy, and dignity back to the people even if it is at the price of taking power away from the government from time to time.

I wonder how that can be reconciled with David Cameron's pronouncement that he will attempt to remove Brian Haw's war protest in Parliament Square:

I am all in favour of free speech and the right to demonstrate and the right to protest. But I think there are moments when our Parliament Square does look like a pretty poor place, with shanty town tents and the rest of it. I am all for demonstrations, but my argument is `Enough is enough'.

So in principle Mr Cameron is in favour of free speech and protesting but as soon as a protest starts making somewhere look a little bit messy that principle goes out of the window. It seems his commitment to free speech is extremely flaky and arbitrary.

If Mr Davis was still in the shadow cabinet, at least he would be in a position to exert some influence on this sort of authoritarian posturing but of course he isn't. It looks like his plea has fallen on deaf ears and we can look forward to much more of the same in this area as we have had from the current government should the Tories form the next one.

David Cameron should accept David Davis is the real Tory leader

David Cameron has spent a lot of time in the last few weeks talking about how great the First Past the Post electoral system is. He will not countenance any change from this even though MPs can end up elected with often much less than 50% of the vote in their own constituency.

What I find fascinating about this is that if you follow his line of reasoning to its logical conclusion then David Cameron should not be leader of the Conservative party at all. Instead it should be David Davis.

Have a look at this page on Keele University's website where it tracked the voting during the 2005 Conservative leadership contest. You can see quite clearly that in the first round of voting, the following votes were cast:

If this had been a First Past the Post election then David Davis would have been elected leader. Of course that is not what happened and instead there were two more rounds of voting as Ken Clarke and Liam Fox were eliminated and then Cameron and Davis went through to the final round where Cameron got more than two thirds of the votes.

The Conservatives do not trust First Past the Post to elect their own leaders. Indeed if they had have done there would have been a very different result but they clearly do not think that it is fair and does not produce a result that represents the real feeling of the electorate. This is proven by their own results in each round from the 2005 leadership election.

So why do they think it is fair for this system to be foisted on the rest of us for elections for seats to Westminster?

UPDATE: I have had a number of people (including in the comments below) pointing out that the first two rounds were just the MPs which whittled the candidates down to two before they were put to the party as a whole. That is a fair point but it does still show that the Conservative Party has not chosen a FPTP system to elect their leader, instead they used an electoral college (presumably trying to reflect the views of the party at large) in the first two rounds followed by a run off from the party members proper. This is actually closer to how an Alternative Vote system would work with the different rounds to an extent reflecting MPs second and third preferences as they moved forward.

I still think it is a legitimate question to ask why this sort of principle can be applied to their leadership but not at election time for MPs.

Please keep my promises...

I attended the Convention on Modern Liberty a few weeks ago. I haven't really blogged much about it but it was an excellent event, very well attended and with some fascinating panel discussions on various topics relating to liberty. I was disappointed that it did not garner more media coverage (there was some coverage on the BBC news website and short pieces in some of the papers but given the calibre of the event it deserved better).

One of the keynote speeches was delivered by David Davis. He is an excellent public speaker and gave an impassioned oration on liberty or the lack of it in this country and warnings about where we could be headed. He also had very strong words for Jack Straw with which I fully agree. There is an mp3 of his speech available here and a transcript of it here.

The thing that struck me most about his speech however was when he asked for the audiences indulgence whilst he spoke to his own party. Here is the excerpt:


And I ask the non-conservatives in the hall of which I suspect there are a few, to forgive me for a second while I give a message to my own party: please keep my promises. Please abolish the ID cards the first day you get into government. Please reduce 28 days to a more civilised level as soon as you possibly can and please look at every law you pass, every law you pass, and study it so that it gives freedom, privacy, and dignity back to the people even if it is at the price of taking power away from the government from time to time.


Whilst I absolutely applaud Davis for his speech and activity in the area of liberty over a long period I have to reiterate a point I have made before on this blog. Why on earth did he resign? What he is now begging his party to do are things he would have had direct resonsibility for as Home Secretary if he had stayed in his post. Instead of this he is now reduced to pleading with his party from the sidelines.

I was always dubious about his idea of resigning and forcing a by-election as it fell well outside the normal parameters of politicians behaviour. At first I thought that I might have been thinking too much like I was inside the Westminster bubble. However the position Davis is now in I feel vindicates my belief that it was a mistake to give up his position.

If the Conservatives win the next election, we are unlikely to get a Home Secretary with the libertarian credentials of Davis and I think the country will be worse off for it.

Liberal Democrats being dismissed

I have just read this post on the Coffee House Spectator blog by James Forsyth which is an interesting post about the possibility of David Davis returning to the shadow cabinet. I think this would be a good development as I have posted about earlier.

However there is an example in the article of something that I have noticed quite a lot of recently. That is to dismiss Lib Dems out of hand as being irrelecant or just not very good apparently by definition of them being Lib Dems. The particular bit is this:

"Dominic Grieve was impressive in the Commons yesterday but he has failed to cut through in the media. He was outperformed on Newsnight the other night by Chris Huhne which is rather like being the second tallest mountain in Holland."

So Chris Huhne is dismissed out of hand as not being a worthy debating opponent. There is no attempt to define why this should be, it is just assumed that a Tory should be better than a Lib Dem and the fact that Grieve was "outperformed" is seen an an aberration. The truth is of course that Huhne is one of the best politicians of his generation and has huge experience both as an MP and MEP and also in business.

I have seen this attitude often on many of the more partisan blogs especially in the comments sections (e.g. Iain Dale, Guido etc.). Lib Dems are dismissed as an irrelevance or an annoyance.

This frustrates me hugely for a number of reasons:

1. The Lib Dems in my opinion have a great many excellent MPs among their ranks. I would argue that they have most talent proportional to their size of the 3 major political parties in the Commons. People of the calibre of Vince Cable, Chris Huhne, David Laws, Evan Harris, Norman Lamb, Norman Baker, Susan Kramer and Ming Campbell. And I could go on. Frankly most of that list are better than much of the current cabinet and shadow cabinet. It is ridiculous to try and dismiss us with these levels of talent.
2. We often lead the way in terms of policy formation with the other parties initially attacking us (or dismissing us - see any sort of a pattern here) and then a few months later our proposals get adopted and pretty soon they are in the mainstream. I am certain that if we did not exist as a political force then there would be a lot less pressure for these sorts of policies to be adopted by the other two parties. We are far from an irrelevance.
3. Members and supporters of the other two parties act as if the status quo of power flipping between the two of them periodically is just the way it is. They often try to persuade voters to vote for them as a means of keeping the other one out. I recall Tony Blair doing this during the 2005 election warning that a vote for the Lib Dems could let the Tories in by "the back door". Well quite aside from the completely anti-democratic connotations associated with not voting for who you want to because the electoral system might hand the seat to someone you want less (which I have and will continue to post about), the status quo may not be there for ever. It is possible that after the next election, if Labour is defeated quite heavily that they start to implode and within another few years the Lib Dems could end up as the official opposition. It has happened in other countries. Labour and the Tories do not have a divine right to be in positions 1 and 2 in this respect and they and their supporters would do well to remember this. There is also of course the possiblity (quite likely judging by current polls) of there being a hung parliament after the next election. If that happens then all bets are off for how politics pans out over the next few years.

David Davis and the Arrest of Damian Green

I have been involved in a debate in a thread on another blog about why David Davis has not been on the media kicking up a stink about the arrest of Damian Green.

Apparently he has been at a speaking engagement and is heading for the Sky News studios now. I for one am looking forward to seeing him on this soon.

However the problem is that he will not be able to lead for the Tories on this as he foolishly (in my opinion) resigned his seat a few months ago resulting in him ending up on the back-benches once he was re-elected. This is his own fault and Cameron (and others) warned him about the consequences but he did it anyway.

I think David Davis is a very strong politician and it would be best for the opposition if he was leading for them on this but as things are this is unlikely.