Petty, fatuous and micromanaging – it’s the government that got small

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/22/theresa-may-micromanaging-small-government

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Just as there has long been a useful distinction between small-c and big-c conservatism, so there should be one between small government, as in a rolling back of the state, and Small government, connoting government by people of inadequate stature.

With her fatuously unprincipled plan to vet British broadcasters’ programmes before they are transmitted, Theresa May has shown herself to be a proponent of the latter. Quite how the home secretary intended – intends? – to effect this is unclear, but I imagine she planned to visit edit suites herself and decide what should be censored. After all, it was only on Thursday that she and David Cameron personally went out on an immigration raid.

Did you see the pictures of this micromanagement awayday? I know you already know that the reason your crappy boss obsesses about discrepancies with the stationery order is because he or she can’t cope with the bigger targets they’re missing. So I need hardly point out why your prime minister and home secretary decided to spend their day at the sharp end of minutiae. This is Small government in action. “Ooh, I’ve found one hiding in a cupboard, David!” “Well done, Theresa. As the old saying goes: look after the odd one in Southall, and the 318,000 will look after themselves.”

She may imagine herself an enforcer – natural third-in-commands tend to – but May is a politician in urgent need of a magic cake reading EAT ME. Saying rude things about the police a couple of times a year doesn’t count as a political philosophy, or I’d be John Locke. A raid on her big ideas cupboard would come up empty.

During the election I watched her deliver her one supposedly killer line at the party’s manifesto launch, and she paused to let the enormity of its smallness sink in: “I’ve excluded from Britain … more hate preachers than any home secretary!” Look, no one wants to contradict the Abu totaliser flashing in Theresa’s office. But if she gets any smaller she’ll be personally driving these people down to the border in a Nissan Micra. We’ve been here before, with Theresa fretting about “what is being beamed into people’s homes”. And undeniably the media does allow dissemination of all manner of erroneous and iniquitous ideas. During the election, for instance, a Mrs T May of Westminster was given a worryingly prominent platform to claim that an SNP-Labour pact would precipitate “the biggest constitutional crisis since the abdication”. And there were those who thought someone – perhaps a carer? – ought to have intervened.

But I’m afraid a principle isn’t a principle until it is tested. Freedom of speech means allowing people to say whatever they please, even if it’s wrong; even if it’s incendiary and will obviously end up precipitating the very thing it affects to warn against; even if it’s the most idiosyncratic Tory history lesson since erstwhile culture secretary Maria Miller explained that the thing about the end of the first world war was that it “ensured that Europe could continue to be a set of countries which were strong”.

On the formbook, Theresa would have been against the then-BNP leader Nick Griffin appearing on BBC Question Time a few years ago. That, you’ll recall, was an episode in which many failed to cover themselves in glory. The Cabinet minister Peter Hain appealed to the BBC Trust to stop the broadcast, with those lining up against the Beeb’s editorial decision ranging from David Cameron to Alan Johnson to a Guardian editorial.

None of them got their way, thankfully, and viewers were instead able to watch Griffin have what is known in technical terms as an absolute shitter, claiming – among much else – that the Ku Klux Klan weren’t violent, and that Churchill would have joined the BNP. This election, incidentally, the BNP polled a minuscule total of 1,667 votes. If it helps them get their head around things, censors like May should think of Griffin’s performance as death by freedom of speech.

But the bigger question, if you’ll forgive this endless playing around with scale, is surely: whatever happened to the Tories on rights? What does the civil libertarian Dominic Raab think of May’s plan? Or daren’t he exercise freedom of speech now he’s a minister?

For those of us who spent much of Blair’s post-9/11 years with our heads in our hands at the assault on civil liberties, the Tories offered more of a beacon on this issue than New Labour. You may not like this – I didn’t instinctively like it much myself – but it was true. The likes of David Davis were the big voices against the terrifying erosion of liberties in this country, while Blairites plodded robotically through the lobbies to sign away hundreds of years of freedoms in the cause of throwing bad ideas after bad, in a decade dominated by the fallout of their leader’s disastrous wars. One of the Tory-led coalition’s first acts was to abolish ID cards.

But now it appears to be falling to Davis again to advance the cause of liberty. Only this time the enemy is his own slimly majoritied government, which has vowed to repeal the Human Rights Act and replace it with a British bill of rights.

We don’t know what that document would include, because the Tories didn’t keep their promise to publish it before the election. All we have is a policy paper, and to read it is to be struck by how fantastically small their obsessions are. They are preoccupied with things like prisoners’ wives being artificially inseminated to uphold their reproductive rights – how often does that even happen? – thundering: “This is not what the [postwar allies] had in mind when they framed that article.” Well, no. They had rather bigger fish to fry, and so should you. But it’s discrepancies in the stationery order again.

The loss of the union looms; no one on either side of that argument disputes that it would make the UK it left behind smaller. The two institutions admired across the world – the BBC and the NHS – are the very two the Conservatives are hellbent on making smaller. Meanwhile, as Davis feels duty bound to point out, along with other Tory big thinkers such as Ken Clarke and Dominic Grieve, defying decisions handed down by the European court of human rights would damage respect for the rule of law across Europe.

“If we leave,” he warns, “it’s an excuse for everyone else to leave.” Ah well. Perhaps that counts as an ambition of sorts: to export our gathering smallness to the rest of Europe.