The intangible edifice

MY FATHER RARELY talked about what he went through in the Second World War. When he did, he didn’t say much. The only clue in our home to the fact that this quiet, un-belligerent man had once been a soldier lay in the inside covers of the orange-and-white Penguin books – Orwell, Huxley, Shaw, Graves – that had gone to war with him in his knapsack, each stamped with his name, rank and service number.

But he did tell me more than once that, during his most terrifying hours in Normandy, what kept him going was the memory of a particular line from Winston Churchill’s most famous speech, broadcast four years earlier: ‘Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation.’

This was odd. Neither my father nor Churchill was visibly Christian, except in the loosest sense. Yet that nine-word sentence evoked for both men a clear, potent idea; and, for that reason, it has lodged in my memory, too, springing to the surface whenever I contemplate the ideological edifice that, thanks to earlier generations’ sacrifices, has over-arched the world enjoyed by mine.

What was that edifice? I don’t think you could call it Christian without what Churchill would have called a ‘risk of terminological inexactitude’; yet it spanned the region once known as Christendom, along with its offshoots in the New World and beyond. It had roots in pre-Christian cultures and parallels in non-Christian ones. Its greatest glories flowered after the Church’s political power had been broken. I think of it as post-Christian. Others invoke the Enlightenment.

It was built up messily, often bloodily, at different speeds in different places. Even so, it was coherent and luminous: a shared vision of the way in which free people should govern themselves. Its heroes included Voltaire, Locke, Diderot, Paine, Wilkes, the American Founding Fathers and, often, the people themselves. Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe in the Second World War, described its pillars as ‘intangibles that are the real treasures free men possess’. They included: universal suffrage; equality under the law; due process; parliamentary sovereignty; an independent judiciary; constitutional checks and balances; freedom of speech and conscience; habeas corpus; trial by jury; and free, fair and regular elections with a secret ballot. Churchill called them ‘the title deeds of freedom’.

The proportions and extents to which these were applied varied from nation to nation. The moral edifice itself was discernible to almost all; especially if, like Churchill and those who fought on his behalf, you contemplated the ‘abyss of a new dark age’ that would follow its overthrow. Many summed it up in a word: ‘freedom’.

The Allies triumphed. The edifice survived. A generation of wise leaders (Truman, Acheson, Marshall, Schuman) built institutions to guard it from future storms. Instead of a dark age, Europe and America enjoyed seven decades of prosperity, liberty and, for the most part, peace. Yet today the edifice is so fragile from neglect that it is hard to feel confident that it will endure for another seventy months, let alone seventy years.

Look again at that list of pillars. Only a few are in good repair. On the positive side: universal suffrage is not in doubt in 21st-century Britain, as far as I am aware; nor are regular elections. We can assume, too, that such elections will usually be free and fair – although electoral fraud has been rising, and interference from foreign powers and invisible digital forces has become a familiar threat. We also remain equal under the law – or, rather, we are more equal than we used to be, given changes in the law relating to homosexuality. (The fact that, in practice, some laws are enforced more rigorously on some citizens than on others is regrettable but neither new nor, for our purposes, relevant. The law itself considers us equal.) Beyond that, however, little seems secure.

Provisions in the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill to allow ministers to use statutory instruments to make secondary legislation after the UK has left the EU suggest strongly that arbitrary power is no longer seen in Downing Street as a threat to be kept in check. Such instruments use ‘Henry VIII powers’ – conferred on the Crown by the 1539 Statute of Proclamations – and are hard to reconcile with the idea that legislation can be changed only by Parliament. Of course, Brexit is a special case. Cases that prompt the chipping away of democratic liberties generally are.

Habeas corpus? If we discount extended detention under anti-terror laws (see previous comment about special cases), the right not to be imprisoned without due process remains intact – except, that is, for the unlucky few who fall foul of the 2003 Extradition Act (or, some would argue, the European Arrest Warrant).

Trial by jury? Again, most of us retain our right to it; yet it is no longer absolute. The Criminal Justice Act (2003) gave rarely used powers to courts to order trial by judge alone in certain cases where there is thought to be a risk of jury-tampering. Unsuccessful government attempts to reduce further the right to jury trial have included the Criminal Justice (Mode of Trial) Bill (1999–2000), the Criminal Justice (Mode of Trial) (No. 2) Bill (2000) and the Fraud (Trials Without a Jury) Bill (2007). The legal Establishment has been ambivalent at best. In May 2017, for example, Lady Justice Hallett, vice president of the criminal division of the Court of Appeal, combined a general defence of trial by jury with a call for the government to remove defendants’ right to demand jury trial in some petty crime cases. The right survives, for now. The attacks hardly imply that it is considered sacrosanct.

Freedom of the press seems equally precarious. The position may have changed by the time you read this: a government announcement was reported to be imminent as this book was going to press. But for much of the past five years, thanks to Lord Justice Leveson (now plain Sir Brian Leveson), every newspaper or magazine in the UK has been within one moment of ministerial pique of being coerced into submitting to a form of state control, for the first time since 1695. Quite how this happened is anyone’s guess. The Leveson Inquiry was set up in 2011 in response to claims that improper relationships between press, police and politicians had facilitated unacceptable behaviour by all three. For some reason, only the press have so far been subjected to the full rigour of Leveson’s scrutiny – and even that did not seem very rigorous. The obviously seismic effects of digital news were barely mentioned in the learned judge’s 2012 Report into the Culture, Ethics and Practices of the British Press, while at least one passage in the report was based on a hoax Wikipedia entry. Despite such farcical fallibility, Leveson’s recommendations have been allowed to redefine the relationship between the state and the British press. Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act (2013), which would force publications to join a regulator approved by the Press Recognition Panel or risk having to pay both sides’ costs even in libel or privacy cases that they won, has not yet been activated – or not at the time of writing. But there has been no shortage of people in Parliament who would like to activate it. Members of the House of Lords (including, bizarrely, some Liberal Democrats) recently tried to use a series of amendments to the Data Protection Bill to increase the pressure on newspapers to sign up to the state-approved regulator and to remove protections for investigative journalists. Other such attacks will no doubt follow. Our celebrated free press – ‘the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize’, according to Churchill – has been learning to go about its business with half an eye always on the possible consequences of incurring politicians’ displeasure. Meanwhile, the notional leader of the free world, President Trump, has spent most of his presidency at war with his nation’s free media.

There’s more; but you don’t need me to spell out every instance. The trend is clear: we remain free – and current threats to our liberty seem slight by the standards of true tyrannies. Yet our freedoms, once cleanly cut in stone, are blurring at the edges. Parliamentary sovereignty? Opinions differ as to whether it has been compromised by the EU, or by referendums whose outcomes MPs have no right to gainsay. Few people consider it unquestionable or unquestioned. Judicial independence? It’s arguable that this was strengthened by the establishment of a Supreme Court under the Constitutional Reform Act (2005). We shall soon see, however, that this isn’t the only way of looking at things.

Many of our rights and freedoms are guaranteed by the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Human Rights, and by the non-EU-related European Convention on Human Rights. The former is unlikely to be of much use to UK citizens after Brexit, and our current Prime Minister has a long-standing determination that we should withdraw from the latter (although withdrawal is less imminent than it once seemed). There is talk of a new British Bill of Rights to fill the gap. No one can say what such a bill would contain. And so it goes on. The lights of liberty are not yet going out, but they are flickering – which is rarely a good sign. ‘We must never cease’, said Churchill in his most famous post-war speech, ‘to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the habeas corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law, find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.’ But we have ceased. The inviolable absolutes of freedom are no longer inviolable; and, as a result, are no longer safe. Too many toes have been dipped in the Rubicon.

Cynics might dismiss Churchill’s pieties – and Eisenhower’s – as the hollow posturing of an Establishment that showed few qualms about curtailing citizens’ rights in times of national emergency (and was rather more concerned with the rights of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men than with those of the world’s many other kinds of citizen). Yet their rhetoric did have this going for it: people believed it. After the war, millions looked back and felt that they had risked their lives, voluntarily or otherwise, for those title deeds of freedom. Of course they venerated them.

We still have those title deeds somewhere, but we have long since ceased to cherish them. Instead, for many in politics – in the current government, and in the previous one, and in the one before that and the one before that; and, almost certainly, in the next – those checks and balances our parents and grandparents fought for have come to be seen as an archaic nuisance. Everyone signs up to them as a broad abstraction. In practice, the details are held to be questionable, negotiable, avoidable, even moveable – while those who insist on their sacred primacy are crankish, out-of-touch liberals.

Were Churchill and Eisenhower liberals? That’s not how Conservatives or Republicans think of them (notwithstanding Churchill’s early years in the Liberal Party). It’s not how Labour traditionalists think of their wartime figureheads, either: Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin abhorred the kind of left-wing politics that strangles freedom, but they were no less Labour for that. Today, however, the principles that such men defended so stirringly – principles upon which, in their view, the survival of civilisation depended – have been relegated to a mere eccentricity: to liberalism.

‘Hail Trump!’ chanted supporters of the incoming US president at a National Policy Institute rally in Washington in November 2016, raising their arms in fascist salute. Trump disowned them; yet how could a lover of freedom not be alarmed? The far right has been represented in Trump’s White House, and emboldened by his presidency, to an extent that the Allies of the Second World War would have regarded as obscene; and it took a presidential retweet of some grotesquely inflammatory Britain First videos to provoke even a qualified rebuke from the UK government. In Europe, meanwhile, illiberal nationalists have been prowling within reach of power from Budapest to Paris, Amsterdam to Warsaw. Some, such as Norbert Hofer, Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen, have been driven back – but continue to prowl. In the east, however, the strong men call the shots: Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Andrej Babiš, Jarosław Kaczyński. The latter is not formally in charge of his country (Poland), yet that, disturbingly, barely matters. In the power politics of today’s Eastern Europe, democratic formalities sometimes seem to be optional.

‘The people are taking their country back,’ said Wilders after the Brexit vote. ‘Now we will too.’ In the narrow sense of the Dutch elections of March 2017, he was wrong. Yet something about that ‘we’ haunts me. People of a certain kind did ‘lose’ their countries as a result of the Allied victory in 1945; and, later, through the collapse of Communism in 1989. Are those the people who are now taking their countries back?

We must guard against hysteria. Not every nationalist conservative is a fascist; not all who denounce self-serving political elites are reckless rabble-rousers; not every Momentum activist admires the achievements of Joseph Stalin. But some are, and some do. Old taboos that would once have made it unthinkable for an avowed enemy of democracy to gain political traction have lost their potency. Some academics have even spoken of a global ‘democratic recession’.

As I write this, the democratic institutions of the US – the ultimate guarantor of Western freedoms – are undergoing the severest of stress-tests. The UK’s crumbling edifice has yet to be exposed to such strains. But there’s a storm coming. The approaching convulsions of Brexit are plainly visible on the horizon. When the storm breaks, will our hard-won, ill-defined, bodged-together parliamentary democracy be strong enough to withstand it?

It’s hard to feel confident. That ideological edifice – the edifice, saved from Hitler, on which the post-war consensus about democratic first principles was built – feels barely more robust today than the Palace of Westminster. A bit of sustained battering could be all it takes to reduce it to ruins.

Why? How has this happened? There’s a bitter irony to the most plausible answer: democracy.