Banned wagon

A weekly survey of the things our rulers want to prohibit

PAEDOPHILES and other sex offenders do not enjoy a lot of public sympathy. Yet is that any reason for the attack on their rights contained in the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act, which came into force last week?

Under the provisions, which amend the Sex Offenders Act 1997, sex offenders are obliged to furnish police with any change of address within three days; failure to do so can result in a prison sentence of up to five years. The sex offender is also obliged to notify police of an intention to travel abroad, how and when and where he intends to leave the country, his point of entry into a foreign country and the address of his accommodation for his first night out of the country.

What really raises eyebrows is that these requirements apply not just to those convicted of sex offences, but to those merely cautioned over them. Such people have neither had their guilt proved in court, nor have they been invited to prove their innocence. Yet, in the name of public safety, they are to have foisted on them the humiliation of being treated as a convicted criminal.

The government argues that since the offender is not being prevented from travelling abroad, his human rights are not being infringed; yet to be labelled as a sex offender when you have not been tried tests to the limit the principle of being innocent until proved guilty. And who knows to what misuse the information may be put if passed to foreign police forces that do not realise what a caution from a British bobby means?

In the past the police, when issuing a caution, were in effect saying, 'There may be a case against you, but we are not sure that proceeding with it would be of benefit to society.' Now it seems to mean, 'Society would benefit from your conviction, but we are not sure that we can prove the case against you.' were effing Telegraph readers, too, across the shires and suburbs, voting in droves for the Lib Dems, and often for Labour. As one former editor of that paper might have put it, some mistake surely? If the Tory papers had been right, then Hague should have swept the country, or at least won back dozens of seats. What had gone wrong?

There was no mistake about Blair's triumph. Apart from simply emptying politics of its content, he has mastered a quasitotalitarian strategy of 'inclusion', its spirit summed up with exquisite unconsciousness on election night by Shaun Woodward: New Labour is 'a party for anyone, not for people of a particular class or a particular view'. This strategy has been carried out ruthlessly. The stocks were sold, the press was squared, the middle class was quite prepared to vote Labour. So successfully was the press squared that every London newspaper actively or passively supported Labour except the two Mails and the two Telegraphs.

Holding out against the ruling junta's blandishments is creditable in itself, and the motives of the newly Blairite press deserve close scrutiny. On the day after the election, the affable editor of the Daily Telegraph talked on the radio. Apart from fancifully suggesting that the next leader of the Tory party should be David Trimble, Charles Moore said that the Times had followed its traditional role as the voice of the establishment. Now, as ever, it is 'strong on the stronger side', advocating appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s, of Stalin in the 1940s, and of Blair today.

But what of the Telegraph? Its own traditional role was to be not so much the conscience of the Tory party as its voice of common sense, of pragmatism and 'bottom'. There was a time when the Telegraph eschewed doctrine. Its politics were sometimes brutal, but never esoteric. Even now, the Mail remains reflexive but unideological, suspicious of Europe without any dogmatic Eurosceptic position, loathing IRA terrorists while backing the peace process. Although the Mail and the Blair junta aren't as cosy as they once were, the junta doesn't hate the Mail with the passion it hates the Telegraph, whose opposition to the Belfast Agreement is principled and obdurate.

That looks creditable too — until one sees that, even when the 'Telegraph version' is right, it is right for the wrong reasons. On both Ulster and Europe, the Tories have caught an infection from the Telegraph: an obsession with 'sovereignty'. There is an excellent case for Euroscepticism. Federal integration and the single currency aren't popular causes anywhere in Europe: the Danes voted against Maastricht and the euro, the Irish have just voted against Nice. They are not popular here either — but neither are they central issues, a crucial distinction which seems to have escaped both

Hague and the Telegraph. 'Save the pound' was quite simply the silliest slogan the Tories could have chosen.

Fogey press rhetoric about our sacred pound sterling has anyway always been mysterious. They speak as if our currency were a proud national monument, like Germany's. The Germans had a real emotional attachment to the Deutschmark, one of the comparatively few achievements of the past century in which they can take pride. They wouldn't have chosen to replace it with the euro if they had been asked, and they now chafe within the single currency.

By contrast, whenever our own currency jingos talk rhapsodically about the pound, I can't help thinking that when the DM was created little more than half a century ago, you could buy 14 marks for a pound. You can now buy barely three, and even then we are told that we shall have to devalue yet again before entering the single currency, or maybe if we don't. Since 1945, every British government has known only one macroeconomic strategy, which is regular competitive devaluation. It is a very strange basis for the Tories to campaign on, and equally strange for the press to encourage them.

All along the Tories have had an obvious alternative course, if only they could get over their European obsession and their surly resentments. The Tory press was genuinely shocked by Blair's 'forces of conservatism' speech. But no one bothered to examine that speech closely to see that it was as much an attack on the best traditions of the Left as on principled conservatism — and that it was above all a brutal attack on liberty. While Blair denounced the institutions and people which stood in the way of total power, he used the riveting phrase 'stupid libertarianism'. There stood his enemy in plain view: people so stupid that they actually believed in due process, limited government and individual freedom.

Now that should have been the campaign theme dictated to the Tories by the Telegraph and the Mail. What is most repellent about Blair's New Order is its horrible bossiness and authoritarianism. The Tories could have said, 'We are the party of liberty'. They could have been the gay party, in any sense you like, rediscovering their merry cavalier roots, setting us free to keep the money we earn and spend it as we like, fighting for the freeborn Englishman's right to hunt whatever furry animals he likes, engage in whatever sexual practices he likes, and consume whatever stimulants he likes, if not necessarily all at the same time. Not the least of Kenneth Clarke's attractions is that he so obviously wants us to enjoy our cake and ale, because he enjoys his own. Cannot the Telegraph and Mail see that?

At present, and under any likely leader, or even under David Trimble, the Tories seem destined for as long a spell in opposition as Labour after 1979. And yet they didn't become the most formidable European political party of the past 125 years without a fierce appetite for power and endless capacity for reinventing themselves. The Tories could do that again, if only their supporters in the press would let them. But with friends like these. . .