Paul Rogerson's blogs

Civil liberties have few friends in government – only in opposition. Witness the coalition’s decision to hand police and intelligence agencies far-reaching new powers to monitor emails, phone calls and websites. ‘Big Brother WILL be watching you,’ booms today’s Independent.

It all started so promisingly, too. Page 11 of the coalition agreement, struck in May 2010, stated: ‘The government believes that the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused and eroded fundamental human freedom and historic civil liberties. We need to restore the rights of individuals in the face of encroaching state power, in keeping with Britain’s tradition of freedom and fairness.’

A just verdict on New Labour? Absolutely. Guilty as charged, m’lud. A progress report one year later, by the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, showed that real progress was made in the early months of the new administration. ID cards were scrapped; steps were taken to remove the profiles of one million innocent people held on the national DNA database; the ContactPoint database of children’s details was dumped; and the criminal record check regime reformed.

The same coalition agreement also promised: ‘We will end the storage of internet and email records without good reason.’

So what has changed? The technology has advanced apace, granted, but so far as to justify Britain adopting the same kind of surveillance as China and Iran?

The reforms are promoted as combating terrorism. And there are still Islamist extremists out there in the ether, pledging eternal jihad. But in July it will be seven years since 7/7. The available evidence suggests the security services have done an excellent job in rooting out potential terrorists since then. It would be foolhardy to argue that the threat has been extinguished (and no journalist would offer such a hostage to fortune), but where is the evidence that the preventive powers already available are inadequate? Where – to quote the coalition document – are ‘good reasons’?

It is an iron law of public life, of course, that the police and intelligence officers are programmed to seek whatever permissions they can from suggestible politicians (who rapidly become ‘house-trained’). It’s in their DNA, if you’ll pardon the irony.

What ministers have failed to do over many years is to achieve the requisite balance between freedom and national security that is the hallmark of a properly functioning democracy. What’s in progress here is a terrifying continuum of ever-increasing state encroachment, the logical culmination of which is a security camera in every house. After all, if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.

So far today, opposition to the proposals in parliament has been led by thwarted would-be Tory leader David Davis – presumably because Labour is so hopelessly compromised on the issue. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats, in whose own DNA one might expect to find ‘civil liberties’ encoded, are apparently meekly accepting of the plans. Who else is there: George Galloway?

Some things are more important than petrol and pasties. Some democracy. Some liberty.

‘Know your own strength!’ the historian and intellectual E.P. Thompson told the biggest central London demonstration for years, on 25 October 1992. But we’ll never know whether the 150,000 who marched that day did know it, since they were protesting against the Major government’s emasculation of Britain’s coalmining industry.

It would seem they were dimly aware at best. For, after a raucous day out for the usual suspects, the pits eventually shut anyway and those notorious breeding grounds for labour militancy became part of history. As a governmental strategy, ‘Ignore them and they’ll disperse’ often works a treat, just as it did when two million vainly marched against the second Iraq War.

It’s an odd memory to dredge up, but the phrase ‘know your own strength!’ popped into my head unbidden in connection with - of all things - the courtroom interpreter fiasco. For what we have here is an old-fashioned public sector strike, against a hubristic government, which looks like it might succeed (or at least not fail) because the workforce is united.

Except it isn’t a public sector strike at all. Self-employed freelance interpreters have individually decided they are not going to put up with the Framework Agreement and have collectively told the Ministry of Justice and its contractor, Capita-owned Applied Language Solutions, to shove it. They have withdrawn their labour without needing to submit to a time-consuming member ballot and engage with Britain’s restrictive trade union legislation.

Result - hamstrung courts, enraged wigs and panic at the MoJ. At least one magistrates’ court has had to resort to Google Translate; it’s hard not to laugh, if only sardonically. What was the MoJ’s contingency plan after being warned two years ago by the Professional Interpreters’ Alliance that its members just wouldn’t put up with lower paid agency work? ‘They can lump it’ would be my guess.

Of course, employers incommoded in this way will often resort to what unreconstructed Trotskyites still like to call ‘scab labour’. But the interpreters are in a rare position of strength, because there doesn’t seem to be any in this instance. Hard to see the home secretary breaking the strike by throwing open the ports to English-speaking foreigners. Wouldn’t play well in the Daily Mail.

Meanwhile, it is mildly surreal to see pictures of interpreters brandishing placards, because they make such unlikely subversives; but then, as a breed, so do lawyers. Still, who was it who said governments derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed? What would happen if solicitors and barristers across the land simply downed tools and refused to countenance the legal aid cuts, for example?

But that’s not how we do things here. We leave that sort of thing to the French.

Paul Rogerson is Gazette editor-in-chief

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In 1984 I was at secondary school in Wakefield, where the playing fields backed on to a training college for West Yorkshire Police.

One afternoon, while meandering reluctantly to rugby practice, I encountered an extraordinary scene.

Hundreds of uniformed police in full riot gear could be spied through a hole in a high fence bellowing provocatively at another group of policemen in civvies.

The latter were pelting the former with wooden (and therefore not especially dangerous) bricks.

What was also surprising was the palpable alarm on the face of the commanding officer when he realised they were being watched.

He sent me on my way with a guttural northern curse, making it clear that I had seen something I shouldn’t have.

Why was he so sensitive to a nosey schoolboy?

Only years later did it dawn on me what I had witnessed - a full dress rehearsal for the Battle of Orgreave.

This was the dramatic and violent confrontation between police and picketing miners at a British Steel coking plant which proved to be a turning point in the history of organised labour in this country.

As everyone knows, the miners were beaten – in some cases literally – and trade unions went into a seeming death spiral thereafter.

More than a quarter of a century later, as hundreds of thousands of public sector workers strike in defence of their pensions, the corpse would seem to be twitching.

But this time it looks and feels very different.

This is hardly your textbook altercation between horny-handed sons of toil and the shock troops of the hated boss classes, on the Fred Kite model. (And if you don’t know who Fred Kite is, I commend to you the 1959 Boulting Brothers film I’m All Right Jack, starring Peter Sellers as the cartoon shop steward of that name and a deliciously louche Terry-Thomas).

No, today’s is very much a white-collar insurgency, as teachers, court staff, passport workers et al down their Bic biros and man (person?) the picket lines.

So what has all this to do with solicitors, apart from insofar as it disrupts their working day?

Well consider this.

In some quarters recent developments are being interpreted as a renewed assault on what the Conservative-led government regards as ‘vested interests’ standing in the way of its wider agenda.

This is to shrink the role of the state dramatically and marketise those parts of the economy that continue to be shielded from the full, purgative blast of neoliberalism.

The deficit is simply a cover for this agenda – we are not Greece.

The conspiracy theory, if it is one, is backed by circumstantial evidence. Look at the civil legal aid reforms.

Continued provision on the same model was and is affordable.

Indeed, the Law Society presented a plan for alternative savings in any case, with which ministers barely seemed to engage.

Over 5,000, overwhelmingly hostile, respondents to the green paper were simply ignored.

Similarly, the government-commissioned Hutton report acknowledged that public sector pensions continue to be affordable and that their share of GDP will actually decline over the next few decades.

What the government really wants, say its most trenchant critics, is to reduce terms and conditions of employment to the point where whole swathes of the public sector will be attractive to profit-hungry asset strippers.

In the NHS meanwhile, a wholesale privatisation scheme which appeared in neither governing party’s manifesto seems to have foundered in the face of opposition of one union which can continue to boast huge power - the British Medical Association.

Ah yes, the BMA. This morning we learn that the doctors have voted overwhelmingly to ballot for industrial action if the government decides to tamper with their own, generous, final salary pension scheme.

This will surely give the prime minister pause for thought.

No government picks a fight with the medics if it can help it, mainly because voters love the men and women in white coats (in a way they don’t love lawyers, alas).

Even the left-wing firebrand Nye Bevan had to ‘stuff their mouths with gold’ to get consultants to back the establishment of the NHS.

Plus ça change, etc etc.

We must wait and see how all this plays out.

But today’s dispute is not one the coalition can afford to be seen to lose - much as Margaret Thatcher would not have survived had she yielded to Arthur Scargill.

The historical parallel ends there though.

This time the losers, if losers they turn out to be, will be very different.

It’s not the foundries and pits that are deserted today, but the courtrooms and classrooms, and soon perhaps, the surgeries.

Today’s ‘vested interests’ are not the miners or steelworkers, but the teachers and the doctors. And the lawyers too.

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Earlier this year I blogged that judges’ generous pension entitlements would end up squarely in the line of fire following fiscal meltdown. And lo, it has come to pass, as the two main parties try to out-macho each other in respect of how severely they can punish public servants who were in no way responsible for the crash.

George Osborne, the next chancellor of the exchequer if you believe the opinion polls, proposed a £50,000 a year cap on taxpayer-funded public sector pensions at this week’s Tory party conference.

Judges are probably the occupational group that would suffer most.

To recap, judges pay just 1.8-2.4% of their salaries to accrue a final salary pension at the rate of 1/40th for each year of service, up to 20 years. This is quite staggeringly generous. Let’s say you’re a judge earning £170,000 a year – halfway up the ladder. For a modest outlay of about £34,000 before tax at current prices, you can retire after 10 years’ service on an annual pension of £85,000 for life. If you live for another 20 years, that’s a cool £1.7m from the taxpayer. Only the governor of the Bank of England (1/30ths) fares better in the public sector.

Even better, this is a final salary scheme. Move up and you stand to get far more.

A £50,000 cap would soon derail this particular gravy train. Pensions already earned, or already in payment, would appear to be sacrosanct. However, it seems a future Tory government would change existing public sector pension schemes to stop further pension accrual above £50,000 while scheme members are still in employment.

At what cost? The Senior Salaries Review Body (SSRB) points out that it is ‘important to assess the value of the judicial pension as a substantial part of the reward package’. Quite so, because judges’ salaries – while hefty – don’t come close to what the best of private practice has to offer.

Is the prospect of becoming a judge about to become a whole lot less attractive? Or will judges be treated as a special case, as they were when Lord Falconer removed the requirement that tax relief on personal pension savings be limited to the lifetime limit?