In defence of doorstopping

For an administration supposedly dedicated to working voters, this government has an odd way of showing it. You may not have seen one of the amendments it slipped into the Crime and Policing Bill last week but it ought to alarm anyone with old-fashioned views about democracy, or for that matter personal freedom. 

The new clause (amendment 381, available here) makes it a crime to go to, or even near, the home of any elected official whatever (ranging from the Prime Minister to an MP to a humble parish councillor), or any member of the House of Lords, with a view to making your feelings known to them, whether by one’s words or even by one’s mere presence. 

When there, it criminalises any attempt to persuade them to do (or not do) anything in connection with their office, or to complain about their conduct in it. For good measure it is also prohibited to urge them to do anything he is not bound to do, or to complain of any past conduct that was within their rights, even if entirely unconnected with his office. Oh, and one more thing: it applies not only to office-holders, but to any candidate for election to these offices. The penalty for breaking this law? Up to six months inside. Yes. You read this right.

In other words, any house in which a politician lives becomes in law a virtual no-go zone. Why? Pressure, of course, from the political class. A number of MPs and senior councillors were unhappy that people were allowed to disturb them by demonstrating outside their homes, and certainly didn’t care for being buttonholed by journalists as they set out for a day’s work. Egged on by a report a few weeks ago from the House of Commons Speaker’s Conference (consisting again of politicians), speaking darkly of supposed threats to safety and even democracy arising from the fact that ordinary people had taken it into their head to start interacting directly with their politicians, the government obliged. It seems to have told the parliamentary draftsman not to worry too much about possible overkill but instead to draft the widest prohibition possible. 

Wide it most certainly is. True, it catches journalists making themselves a nuisance by importuning for a morning statement, and protesters causing inconvenience by noisily objecting to an MP’s views. But it goes further — preposterously further. Read it carefully. Taken au pied de la lettre, it threatens with a criminal record the villager visiting a parish councillor to ask him to vote for a donation to the village hall, and the activist who delivers a note through the same man’s letter-box complaining about his conduct as a company director. Be very careful too about visiting your MP to sell him a poppy, or for that matter popping over to ask to borrow a bag of sugar from the neighbour who happens also to be a candidate for council office. In both cases, after all, you are trying — oh horror! — to induce him to do something he can lawfully refuse to do.

Put bluntly, in a free country this is an outrage

No doubt the Home Office spin machine will now hum, with spokesmen cooing to anyone who will listen that there is nothing to worry about. This is all about safety, they will say, murmuring the names of Jo Cox and David Amess; the law has to be wide to avoid loopholes, but discretion will of course be exercised in actually prosecuting breaches; having to put up with disturbances at home might put people off standing for election; and anyway this is really just about protecting home life, and who could disagree with that?

Don’t be fooled. Put bluntly, in a free country this is an outrage. Jo Cox and David Amess were not, remember, assassinated at home; and one suspects that for most would-be attackers of elected officials the prospect of a six-month stretch for being in the wrong place at the wrong time is the least of their worries. Lazily criminalising vast swathes of entirely innocent conduct with a view to leaving decisions about who really deserves punishment up to police and prosecutors is unacceptable in any society that claims to value liberty. And if someone seeking political office is seriously put off by the rough and tumble of contact with the vociferous and bloody-minded, some might think that they ought to be looking elsewhere for their fulfillment anyway. 

As for the need to protect home life against intrusive demonstrators, journalists and others, this is a bit more plausible: but if so, doesn’t this apply to all of us? Protecting everyone’s domiciliary peace, from the lord in his castle to the just-about-managing in his maisonette, might well be defensible. What is indefensible is the notion that a politician or councillor should be entitled to greater privacy from the public and the press than, say, the tycoon living next door who faces criticism of the way his company is run. This begins to look uncomfortably like a self-important establishment insisting that, rather like a group of strutting school prefects, it deserves privileges in ordinary life denied to the rest of us.

And that is the real difficulty with this amendment. It has about it an air of a smug and self-righteous ruling class telling us in the hoi polloi that it is high time we showed some respect for our betters and refrained from contact with them except on their terms and in a manner acceptable to them. That might have been acceptable in the deferential days of a hundred years ago. It won’t do today. If you believe in a democracy run by and for ordinary people, this is one amendment that needs to be roundly called out and defeated.