"The parties agree to implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties under the Labour government and roll back state intrusion." This sentence, published in the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition agreement, is one that civil libertarians have been waiting a long time for, and to hear David Cameron and Nick Clegg talk about their government handing back privacy and curbing the powers of the state was certainly a moment worth savouring.
One of the most frustrating parts of watching the attack on rights and liberties over the last 13 years has been the failure of anyone in government to admit what was happening. The programme seemed to unfold with a demonic and silent energy all of its own. But now in the agreement we have that acknowledgment, as well as an assurance that civil liberties will be at the heart of the new coalition government. Although the Conservative manifesto touched on freedom, there can be no doubt that the list of substantive measures came from the Lib Dems and their freedom bill, which they published for the Convention on Modern Liberty last year.
Civil liberties, so often swept aside in the election debate, turned out to be a really useful binding agent between the two parties over the course of the negotiations of the last few days. We only have the headlines at the moment but I understand that it will be filled out when Kenneth Clarke, the new justice secretary and his liberal colleagues come to work on what is called the freedom or great repeal bill, in one shape or another proposed by both parties.
But the main provisions are all there – the scrapping of the £4.5bn ID card and the national identity register, the abolition of the £350m Children's ContactPoint database and the outlawing of fingerprinting of children in schools without parental permission. These will have campaigners like No2ID and Arch, the children's rights charity, opening champagne. But there is much more to celebrate. The government has reasserted the important principle of innocence by "adopting the protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database", which means that the DNA of people acquitted of less serious offences cannot be held by the police.
Just as we learn of two more applications for criminal trials to be heard without a jury, the new government announces: "The protection of historic freedoms through the defence of trial by jury." Jury trial is a vital symbol of democracy and it is good to see this established in the new government's criminal justice regime. It is also very important that we have rights restored on non-violent protest, which we must hope include the right to demonstrate without being photographed by the police Forward Intelligence Teams and that there are to be safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation, which presumably will include restraints on stop and search and the abused surveillance powers given to over 700 agencies and local authorities under the RIPA.
As I read through the list, I have an exhilarated sense of restoration. It is a relief to see the end of proposals that would have allowed the government to store and draw on the data from phone calls, emails, texts and net connections. This will do more than just save money: it reverses the arrogance and sense of entitlement that the Labour government displayed towards personal privacy and those that claimed it was a key element in any democracy.
There are other important measures – especially the undertaking to review CCTV regulation, the commitment to extend the Freedom of Information Act so to ensure greater transparency, and to review the libel laws, which have been abused by powerful individuals and corporations to stifle free speech and academic research.
The Lib Dems did a great deal of research on the proliferation of criminal offences under Labour, revealing that 3,500 new offences were created since 1997. We now have a guarantee of a mechanism to prevent this compulsive need to criminalise the public with laws that people were often ignorant of.
An important omission in this list is control orders, one of the defining monstrosities of Labour's authoritarian regime, which provides for the house arrest of terror suspects without their being allowed to know of the evidence against them or to attend proceedings in which their cases are heard. There is also no word about 28-day pre-charge detention for terror suspects, or the vetting barring procedure, which both parties have criticised. There will be an important test of the coalition's real nature at the end of May, when the 28-day pre-charge detention power can only be extended if the government lays a statutory instrument before parliament. Otherwise the maximum period of pre-charge detention will revert to 14 days.
We must wait to see what is in the great repeal bill before passing judgment, but this is a promising start that touches on all the important areas and provides great hope for campaigners and activists, so long disdained by the Labour government as being either hysterical or crazed by individualism. We know enough to say that real and important changes have already taken place, and that these could only have occurred under the new coalition.