WHEN the wolf is at the door civil liberties and human rights all too often disappear out the back. A fine exception during these hard times has been advances in gay rights, a phrase intended to encompass the wider LGBT communities.
For liberal-minded secularists the heart-warming advance of same sex marriage, with those fantastic photographs on The Herald’s front page, was a counterpoint to bleak economic times.
Rightly, we have stopped talking about the “Pink Pound” as it’s just ordinary fellow citizens’ cash. It brings to mind our youngest tribune, Mhairi Black, being asked when she came out the closet and replying that she was “never in”. In other words, normalisation. All good.
But while we can enjoy some progress, the wider agenda on rights and liberties is not in a good place, which is largely down to lack of public pressure caused by pressing economic considerations.
From the UK Government’s onslaught on the European Convention on Human Rights to the Scottish Government’s failure to chase the public pound on Freedom of Information, there is a sense that things happen with scant resisatance because food banks and zero hours contracts simply seem more important.
As new Liberal Democrat leader, Tim Farron has decided to accentuate civil liberties issues in line with old-style Liberal Party priorities. Leaving aside his own personal problems on the gay rights agenda given his own religious faith, this stress on human rights is a decent idea and stakes out solid ground.
Having passed through a similar near-death experience a year previously, his federal counterparts in Scotland have been staking out the same territory. But there is no real sign of this marking an improvement in the fortunes of Willie Rennie’s party, far less a dent being made in the popularity of Nicola Sturgeon’s Government.
It’s not as if there is a shortage of issues. Although some of the headlines have been absurdly simplistic, there are genuine questions around how stop and search powers are regulated, when police should be armed, how our force merger has affected performance, and when Freedom of Information should be denied.
But on the bigger issue of the shotgun marriage of our old police forces into a singe entity, there has been more than a whiff of political hypocrisy. The notion of the single police force did not arise out of a vacuum in September 2011 when it was announced by the the new majority SNP Government.
Both Labour and the Conservatives had voiced support for looking at this, in particular when it came to the idea of shared call centres — a huge irony given their outspoken criticisms in recent days over the calamitous error over the M9 crash deaths of Lamara Bell and John Yuill.
The creation of a single police force was not in itself a civil liberties issue, but the turf war with the Scottish Police Authority and subsequent oversight failure hampered mechanisms for local scrutiny. The real problem was that a single force became a focus for powerful critics, particularly in Conservative-leaning media, to attack the SNP Government. As a result we had hard line “law and order” newspapers jumping all over issues such as arming officers or stop and search for entirely hypocritical reasons.
Should there be a debate over such issues? Of course, and Holyrood Ministers should have been more pro-active in making the case for this. No-one seriously doubts that police mergers were in part about saving money. That is why both Labour and Tories, and indeed this newspaper, were in favour. That is why we should have been more open about fall-out and consequences instead of leaping to politicise policing.
This SNP Government should take the opportunity of its unprecedented political strength to become overtly more liberal instead of continuing to behave like like a beleaguered minority administration.
Nicola Sturgeon is a natural social democrat and should follow her instincts, liberalising the Freedom of Information regime for all organisations providing public services, being more open when issues have arisen in policing, resisting pressures from the populist right on prison issues.
For most of these issues do not carry a price tag at this time when finances are tight. Indeed, getting our prison population down would be a major saving to the public purse. Opponents of her Government have powerful allies in the Right-wing media, but in the country the First Minister is all powerful.
She should transmit that confidence to all her Ministers and ensure that on human rights and civil liberties her Government is at all times on the right side of the argument.
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