Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation

How the Englishman's home ceased to be his castle

This article is more than 17 years old
Henry Porter
With act after act, Labour infringes our private lives, aided by Tory quiescence. It's time David Cameron rocked the boat

Whichever way you look at it, the two Muslim brothers whose home was raided in London's Forest Gate at the beginning of the month suffered a very serious breach of their rights. Their home was broken into by armed men who didn't declare themselves as police officers. One brother was shot; an officer kicked him in the face, placed a gun at his chest and went on repeating: 'Shut the fuck up.'

This behaviour, the briefing against the brothers and the refusal of the police to apologise until a late hour was completely unacceptable. But, given the intelligence, the police were bound to go into that house because the public's safety must - briefly - take precedence over the rights normally accorded to suspects and any qualms we might have about the sanctity of the home.

What few understand is that, under Blair's continued campaign against the people's rights, forced entry is going to become a lot more common in Britain, although not perhaps with the overwhelming force of Forest Gate. Running in parallel with legislation that invades our privacy - the ID cards' national identity register and the total surveillance by number-recognition cameras in cities and on motorways - is an attack on that great principle of English law, the 'inviolability of the dwelling house'.

The right dates back to 1604, the year that Shakespeare presented Othello to James I and his court and a man named Semayne complained that his home had been broken into and his assets seized by the sheriff. The judgment that followed declared: 'The house of every one is his castle.' It went on to say that if a door is open, a sheriff may enter but that 'it is not lawful for the sheriff, on request made and denial, at the suit of a common person to break the defendant's house.'

Those words are as moving to me as any in Othello because they establish an essential part of English culture: that the home is fundamental to the individual's right to privacy. As one 18th-century commentator put it: 'The law of England has so particular and tender a regard to the immunity of a man's house, that it stiles [sic] it his castle, and will never suffer it to be violated with impunity. For this reason, no doors can in general be broken open to execute any civil process; though, in criminal cases, the public safety supersedes the private.'

This 400-year-old principle has been chucked over by Blair with the familiar combination of stealth and a witless lack of respect for what has gone before. Now your home, like your DNA, fingerprints, image and movements, becomes part of the state's province. And what is distressing beyond words is that there has been no coverage in the press and there are probably no more than a dozen MPs who have put the legislation together and understand what has happened. Truly, this is how freedom is slipping away from us.

So let me briefly set out the laws for you. The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, which, incidentally, is the bill that allows police officers to remove DNA from innocent people - with force, if necessary - and bans demonstrations in Parliament Square, allows the new Serious Organised Crime Agency to serve a disclosure notice on someone, whether or not they are suspected of a criminal offence. The agency may obtain a warrant for forcible entry if a response has not been received to that notice or if it is believed that it would not be 'practicable' to issue a notice.

It doesn't take much imagination to see how this could be abused and what little recourse the ordinary, innocent citizen has under the law, even though he may have done nothing wrong. Similar powers over your property were introduced in the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 which allow a minister to seize assets without compensation if he has reason to believe that some kind of emergency is likely to happen.

A further attack on your home and privacy comes in new proposals on coroners' courts unveiled last week by that strait-laced mediocrity, Harriet Harman. She presents the reform as modernising and creating more openness in the system which is odd, if not dishonest, given that she introduces the idea of secret inquest hearings and, more importantly, suggests that a coroner will have powers of entry, search and seizure.

Remember the principle applied in the Semayne case - that doors 'may not be broken to execute a civil process'. It has always been the case that if wrongdoing is suspected, the police may get a warrant, but why extend these powers to the coroner in circumstances where the law has not been broken?

Let's hope that parliament goes into this with rather more than a vague expectation of updating the process, which seems to be working quite well anyway, and considers the issue in context of the rights, which in 1766 inspired William Pitt to make an impassioned defence of private homeowners against discretionary government searches. What he said then is good enough for me and it bloody well ought to be for Harman and her colleagues.

Writing these columns about our lost liberties, I constantly want to apologise to the readers who have had to endure so much laborious detail. Yet it is only in the detail that you understand that Tony Blair's government is not merely mad and incompetent, but that it is bad, in fact, rotten to the core, and has not the slightest respect for British liberty and the individual. For evidence, look no further than the new system for collecting fines and, while you read the next two paragraphs, have at the back of your mind the vast network of cameras that will now automatically capture your image and number plates in every city and on every motorway and will be responsible for a vast increase in fines levied from the British public.

From March this year, the Courts Act 2003 allowed magistrates to appoint a fines officer who may break into a private home to seize goods, clamp and seize vehicles and increase fines by 50 per cent. Astonishingly, these radical changes which sweep away the principle that your home is inviolate are not part of the Courts Act and were never debated in parliament. The measures were smuggled into law in the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004 and so parliamentary scrutiny on the crucial question of forced entry in civil cases was avoided. A typical Blairite tactic.

No longer is a citizen's home his guaranteed personal space; no longer is it fundamental to his individual right of privacy. And this huge change in our national life has occurred without a murmur of complaint from the opposition. Now that Blair is wearing his attack on our liberty as a badge of honour - actually, what else could he do? - you might expect the Conservative party, with its traditional interest in property and the rights of the individual, to be jumping up and down about these new laws. But sadly, at the very moment we need those values shouted from every platform in the country, the Tories have consigned themselves to rehab to prove that they are not really Tory.

It's all very well David Cameron wearing niceties and looking like a calendar boy, but we need a great statement of conviction, an affirmation of liberty and British democratic values. There's no sign of that coming because he fears - with some reason - that Blair will use such a speech to portray him as weak on crime and punishment.

Still, watching the Prime Minister spluttering at the dispatch box on Wednesday, seeing the blush rise on Hazel Blears's neck during her Newsnight interview and hearing Lord Falconer suddenly admit that Guantanamo was a disgrace, I have begun to think that their game is up. They look shady and rattled.

It's time for Cameron to make that speech, because this is not about politics, but principle. It will take guts, but it has to be done.

Most viewed

Most viewed