Abuse of power part 1
Much ink has been spilt about the extraordinary arrest of Damian Green. This series of articles would run for months if I tried to explore all the various implications. There are a whole host of issues regarding what various Cabinet ministers did and did not know about the proposed arrest, what the Speaker and the Serjeant-at-Arms should and should not have known and done, and various interesting questions regarding the extent of Parliamentary privilege and precisely what acts on behalf of the police were and were not legal. Whilst these are all interesting questions, they are to a greater or lesser extent being played out in the press, and doubtless there will be much more stated in respect of them. What these articles are concerned with is the use and abuse of power.
None of the leaks in this case concerned national security. They were leaks which related to information contradicting claims made on behalf of the government, or putting them into perspective. Whatever your political viewpoint either generally or in respect of these issues, this could hardly be matters that could be characterised as not in the public interest or which involved considerations of secrecy which took them outwith the norm. Seeking to plug leaks, and sack civil servants as necessary, is one thing. Seeking to use the police machinery and powers of arrest is something altogether different.
This is particularly so given that use of leaked material has been a feature of political life for a long time. A recent interesting article by Michael Gove, now Conservative MP and former journalist, detailed circumstances of leaked documents provided to him long ago in respect of Rosyth naval base, provided by the local constituency MP one Gordon Brown. As Mr Gove pointed out, since Rosyth was the base for refitting the nuclear submarines which were part of Britain's nuclear deterrent, there would have been a much greater basis for supposing a potential impact on national security even though the purpose of the leaks was not to affect national security but to seek to protect the future of the naval base.. Anyone giving a moment's thought to the issue would have appreciated the way that leaked documents are used within a democratic process by MPs of all parties. Using the might of prosecutorial power and arrest to impact upon this would, or one would have thought, have been obviously controversial to anyone who had considered the issue properly or at all.
Whoever did or did not know about the police investigation and the proposal to arrest Mr Green, and likewise whoever did or did not know it was proposed to effectively raid his Parliamentary office, and in practical terms suspend the service by which his constituents communicated with him, and take relevant documents, it is plain that this arose because the relevant civil servant at the Department of State concerned called in the police. At the very least one can infer that the police were unlikely to have regarded this as any other than a green light that the machinery of government would like the police to take such steps as they could.
One of the biggest concerns about abuse of power is when officials act in a particular way not because they were instructed to, but because they have a knee-jerk reaction to undertake that which they think their political masters would probably approve of. Once that occurs that has implications for all sorts of powers which the police could use. Next week we will explore the implications of this.