prior knowledge

I’m inclined to believe him:

Gordon Brown has insisted ministers were not aware of the arrest of Tory immigration spokesman Damian Green.

The MP was arrested, held for nine hours, and his homes and House of Commons office searched by police probing alleged Home Office leaks.

 …Opposition MPs have described the move as a "Mayday warning for democracy", while questioning the government's role in the matter. But Mr Brown said he and ministers had "no prior knowledge" of the arrest.

Describing the arrest as "a police matter", he told Sky News: "I had no prior knowledge, the home secretary had no prior knowledge, I know of no other minister who had any prior knowledge"

…while noting that he seems completely unconcerned by this particular police matter. Nor should he be: New Labour consciously accelerated an existing process of giving the police more and wider ranging powers, so it should have occurred to them that this would also result in the cops having greater executive authority and being more unwilling to acknowledge traditional, legal or customary restraints on their behaviour. People have a crude idea that a police state involves a leader ordering the cops to arrest his enemies. It’s mainly an environment where the police have expanded powers over the general administration of the state which they can exercise with a large degree of autonomy. Their turf gets bigger, and is defended and expanded more aggressively.

Parliamentary privilege is a useful thing, but right now it might actually be more useful for the people who have it not to be that much more shielded than the general public from the power of the police.  It might even motivate them to reduce it. Of course, we’re then in a bargaining situation. The cops go easy on the pols if the pols go easy on them.

Comments

[Fellow Traveller]

You've got it right about politicians creating an engine of repression that will crush its creators as readily as their enemies.

Many US politicians lived in fear of J. Edgar Hoover's power.

[ejh]

Ah, parliamentary privilege surely only actually applies in Parliament? Outisde the House the people who possess that the privilege never have been more "shielded", in theory at any rate, than anybody else.