What Vaclav Havel can tell us

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/25/civilliberties

The British government's push towards a database state would have brought admiring sighs from the Czech secret police

Nineteen years ago next week, Vaclav Havel gave a New Year address to the Czech and Slovak people, then yoked together in the one political entity of Czechoslovakia. He had been made President only three days before, but it seems likely that the main theme of his speech had been in his mind for some time.

Reflecting on the 40-year tyranny ended by the Velvet Revolution, he said: "When I talk about the contaminated moral atmosphere … I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all – though naturally to differing extents – responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators."

He then moved to consider the duties of his new government. "Let us not be mistaken: the best government in the world, the best parliament and the best president, cannot achieve much on their own … Freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all."

The British of today and the Czechs of two decades ago are hardly in comparable situations. The Czechs had moved rapidly from the long night into daylight, whereas we have slid from a society of enduring liberal values and respect for rights into a kind of half light that has been brought about by a determined state as well as the apathy and complacency of quite large numbers of people.

Havel's speech still has an important message for us, which is that the state can only become all-powerful if the people allow it. We each have the responsibility to make our democracy work and guarantee freedom and rights for the next generation. It's all about participation. If we fail to take part, to vote or bother to be informed, if we allow ourselves to be ruled by fear of crime, terror and even own obligations then we abdicate our position, and into that space will move the state.

With the crisis in market capitalism we have heard a lot about the benevolent power that resides in the state. I notice a dubious former Labour spin doctor has started to refer to the "smart" state, as though it had been technologically updated and imbued with a new wisdom to deal with the current crisis. If that were the case, one wonders why until recently it failed to regulate the excesses of debt and speculation that brought us to this pass. Let us be clear that no state ever became "smart" without the people's involvement. The tendency of all states with unrestrained powers is to become more authoritarian and altogether less smart.

The self-inflicted banking crisis in 2008, followed by the calamity unfolding in every economy in the world, certainly favours statism and those who wish to see power accumulate at the centre of political systems. We already knew that market capitalism was not the guarantor of freedom that we thought it was back in 1989 – look at the authoritarian capitalist models developed in the former communist states of China and Russia – but it also seems clear that this unprecedented crisis has deep implications for free societies; that political instability and impatience with democratic traditions will rise sharply in 2009.

Still, it's not all bad news. The advance made in Britain in 2008 is that hundreds of thousands of people – maybe millions, given the sudden concern of columnists on the Sun and Daily Mail about the police state – have become aware of the threat of an over mighty state. Just a year ago, people who talked about our slow descent into an authoritarian wilderness were dismissed as the paranoid fringe. Now members of all political parties, ethnic groups and generations have become concerned about the construction of the database state, the government's sidelining of parliament and the remorseless attack on personal liberty.

It is also true that the absurd argument that we have got nothing to fear if we've done nothing wrong was finally laid to rest by the succession of stories about security lapses in official databases. (By my count , there have been over 25 incidents reported in the second half of the year). People on those databases have done nothing wrong but obviously they have got everything to fear from the release of personal information.

It is in the small stories that you see society changing. In a different context, innocence was no protection for a couple in Poole whose local council used anti-terror laws to watch them after they had applied to a new school for their child; or the policeman in Wales who was suffering from depression and went off sick only to become the subject of a £100,000 surveillance operation by his colleagues; or the football fans who were issued with Form 27 under the Violent Crime Reduction Act and prevented from attending matches, or, finally, the care worker who was stopped from getting a job – even in a supermarket – because of unproven allegations kept on police files.

Labour's new laws and the database state persecute and obstruct people who have done nothing wrong, and that message has at last begun to sink in.

During 2008 it became clear to what extent the British government was pushing ahead with the database state, which incidentally would have brought admiring sighs from Havel's old foes in the Czech secret police, the StB. The British state has decided to know everything about us – who we email or talk to on the phone or how we use the internet (the proposed Communications Data Bill that has been temporarily shelved), where and when we go abroad, how we pay for the trip, what we do after leaving this country. It wants to know about movement in this country by car and plane. It retains information from the use of Oyster cards in London, which it hopes to roll out across the country, and of course from the London congestion charge. It also wants to know about every child in minute detail and share the information with one million people but not – of course – the parents of that child.

In its strange obsession to "manage identity", as if all along people have been waiting for the state to define who they are, the government has started to issue foreigners with ID cards – a disgracefully xenophobic act – and when the first cards are given to Britons the process of verification, and therefore government tracking of each individual, will begin.

We now have a pretty good sense of where this will lead, which may account for the decline in support for the ID card. According to the latest government figures it stands at 55%. So a scheme backed by just over half the population is being forced on the country by a party that received support from less than quarter of the electorate' and won only a third of the total vote at the last election. That is hardly a mandate to introduce the cornerstone of the database state.

Don't get me wrong: I've always believed that the democratic state must be given power to act on behalf of us all but that is not the same as the state granting itself powers to know everything about us and to bully those who resist its invasive instincts. In 2004, the Courts and Tribunals Enforcement Act made it legal for the first time in 400 years for bailiffs to force entry into homes on a civil order and remove goods. Now we hear from the Justice Ministry that bailiffs may offer reasonable violence to force inside their own homes. That gives us an idea of how the government plans to enforce the £1,000 fines handed out to ID card refuseniks – ultimately by violence meted out by men who may be no better than nightclub bouncers. It is astonishing that we are going to allow this to happen.

Havel may have been speaking to another era but in the year that marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the totalitarian regimes in the east we should remember his insight about the state: "None of us is just its victim: we are all its co creators."

That is one of the main themes of the Convention on Modern Liberty that will be held in London and across the country on 28 February next year. It will host the sort of debates on these issues that should have been held in parliament these past few years and, crucially, it offers anyone a chance to participate

I apologise for the length of this piece, but it is the last you will be hearing from me until the first week of January. A happy Christmas and New Year to everyone, and may we all keep our nerve in 2009.

A festive kick-and-recommendation of a well written and thoughtful article.