From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

The intense and escalating political dispute in Britain over civil liberties is interesting in its own right, but it also vividly illustrates how craven and barren our own political system — and the U.S. Democratic Party — have become. The sacrifices now being made by British politicians of all parties in opposition to expanded government detention and surveillance powers is, with a few noble exceptions, exactly what our political elite in the Bush era have been — and still are — too afraid or too craven to undertake. As the Democratic Party prepares this week to endorse the Bush administration’s illegal spying program and immunize telecoms which deliberately broke our surveillance laws for years, these contrasts become even more acute.

As I wrote about a couple of days ago, Tory MP David Davis is so passionately opposed to expanded detention powers and to the increasingly invasive British surveillance state generally that he has resigned his seat in Parliament in order to run again on a platform of safeguarding core civil liberties. Although Davis’ own Conservative party leadership is infuriated by his resignation (because it risks the loss of that seat for the Tories), a key member of the Labour Party who also opposes increased detention powers is now defying his own party leadership in order to support Davis’ re-election bid, an extraordinary step for a Labour MP to take, given that Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown is the prime force demanding more government power. From The Guardian today:

Gordon Brown faced a fresh challenge to his authority last night after a leading Labour rebel promised to campaign for David Davis in the renegade Tory’s forthcoming by-election.

Bob Marshall-Andrews yesterday defied the Prime Minister to sack him, adding that he hoped other Labour MPs would join the former shadow home secretary’s one-man crusade for civil liberties.

“They can’t muzzle the whole of the party, and it seems to me foolish in the extreme in the present climate to start describing civil liberties as a stunt,” he told The Observer. “I have had emails asking, ‘Why does it take a Tory to say this’?”

Under party rules, Labour MPs risk expulsion for campaigning for opposition parties. However, the maverick MP for Medway said that, since Labour appeared unlikely to put up a candidate against Davis, he considered himself free to speak so that ‘the voice of a substantial part of the Labour party may be heard’.

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