Double Jeopardy
January 23rd, 2007The proposed separation of the Home Office into two departments is being seen in most reports as an overdue necessity, I have my doubts, especially as the Prime Minister seemingly approves of the idea.
Firstly the creation of a separate department for ‘Security’ implies that the current problems have a set of solutions independent (or abstractable) from other Departments. This is entirely untrue, most of the bad feeling towards the UK is a direct result of bad foreign policy backed up by bad ‘defence’ policies (then to spice the mixture up a load of nonsensical national legislation). If anything a security minister should be a junior official at the Foreign Office.
Secondly this move doesn’t do anything to REDUCE Governmental tinkering, paranoia-mongering and legislative fluff. More than likely this will create a situation where two programmes of legislation relating to ‘law and order’ will be fed through the parliamentary sausage machine with even less scrutiny and more chance of being voted through according to party whipping. Yes MORE of the same ‘need to do something’ posturing but with even less ‘joined-up’ thinking!
Thirdly this change is going to be rushed through which means instead of one ‘not fit for purpose’ government department there will be two slapdash mini-me versions. Presumably in the confusion it will be more likely that serial killers, rapists, embarrassing paperwork will go missing.
Fourthly the proliferation of biometric & database security peddlers will have an extra outlet to lobby government, and government an extra mouthpiece to voice its desires for these.
What the government desparately needs to do is to re-evaluate its ‘need’ to legislate in the face of reason, to massively scale back its meddling control freakery etc. of course this is not going to happen until the day someone walks into Whitehall whose heart is sick to the core of government insidiousness and arrogance. Certainly not a politician.