Alistair Carmichael has criticised the Labour Government for its proscription of Palestine Action. In a recent column for the Scotsman he talked about why he was never able to join the Labour Party:
For all the similarities between Liberal Democrats and Labour, the differences matter too.
Labour has centralising instincts that will always be anathema to liberals who champion community empowerment. Then there is the freedom thing.
Scratch any Labour government and you will find a deep authoritarian streak. It is increasingly apparent that this is every bit as true of Yvette Cooper’s Home Office as it was of those headed by David Blunkett, John Reid and Jack Straw.
He sums up the differences between us and Labour pretty neatly:
For liberals, protecting freedoms of speech, assembly and protest is a given. It runs to the heart of how we see the relationship between the citizen and the state. For Labour, these freedoms are rarely more than ‘nice to have’ when circumstances allow.
He said very much out loud that the Labour decision to proscribe Palestine Action was a mistake:
Targeting military installations for acts of vandalism is not an acceptable tactic to promote the Palestinian cause. It does not, however, make you a terrorist organisation and the decision to proscribe Palestinian Action was disproportionate and a mistake. That proscription would lead to the sort of scenes that we witnessed at the weekend was inevitable.
He called it “illiberal and oppressive” and concluded:
Anti-terrorism laws should be used to deal with terrorists, not our own citizens who wish to demonstrate their disagreements with their government.
Ultimately the biggest threat to our safety could turn out to be Labour’s authoritarian instincts.
You can read the whole article here.
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2 Comments
Two friends, independently, recently asked me if I thought Starmer was a closet Tory. My response was that he was absolutely classic controlling Labour, that statism and conformism were totally on brand for Labour, albeit in three different flavours, and that some on the progressive left should check their history. Alistair is brilliant and bang on, as usual.
Very true Jack,
Labour have always been an organisation based on command and control. Indeed those Lib Dems who view themselves as progressive left, need to understand that a lot of that which is portrayed as progressive left is actually the total opposite of liberal democracy.
In particular the tactics it brings – ‘Those who disagree or even debate on any aspect are the enemy, irrespective of what their overall values are’ etc. etc. – are becoming a trojan horse in the Lib Dem movement for tactics that undermine our core values of tolerance and acceptance, instead replacing them with an authoritarian demand of unthinking approval on pain of isolation and expulsion.
We allow these to grow at our party’s peril.