Bruce Anderson: Andy Burnham, Shami Chakrabarti, and the creeping encroachment of state power

Culture Ministers can have plenty of evenings out, but there's not enough to do in office hours

The Ministry of Culture is not one of the great offices of state. It was invented by Harold Wilson, who wanted to create a post for Jennie Lee, Nye Bevan's widow. In those days, she was the Minister of the Arts. She invented the Open University, which is probably a good thing and definitely a more significant achievement than any of her successors have managed. The years passed and the bureaucratic empire grew. Arts became culture and gained cabinet status. The country has not become more cultured as a result.

Although there is a good case for culling the ministry, thus cutting costs, this is unlikely to happen. Prime Ministers enjoy patronage. It is useful to have a ministry like culture as a first post for a bright youngster on the way up. The current holder, Andy Burnham, is said to be one such. He is certainly young. He may be a cabinet minister. He has no idea how to behave like one.

There is one problem with being Culture Minister. Although there are plenty of tickets for evening events, there is not enough to do in office hours. A few days ago, Mr Burnham whiled away his idleness by giving an interview, partly about David Davis. There is no harm in having fun at Mr Davis's expense about the absurdly self-indulgent by-election, but Mr Burnham went further. He set out to belittle the issue which appeared to exercise David Davis. Anyone who tries to belittle liberty only succeeds in belittling themselves.

Mr Burnham also indulged in some schoolboy sniggering about Mr Davis's friendship with Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, the civil liberties pressure group. Nudge, nudge; wink, wink; giggle, giggle. They had been having conversations late at night. It may be that Andy Burnham misunderstood this because he is still not allowed to stay up late. Anyway, one could find more sophisticated innuendo carved on many a fourth-former's desk.

In response, Shami Chakrabarti let imitation lead her to overreact. She paraphrased Goering: "Whenever I read the Culture Minister, I reach for my libel lawyer." In the words of Lord George-Brown, she should have treated the matter with a complete ignoral, reinforced by some icy contempt. Apropos of libel, she ought to have invented a new legal maxim: that in order for a libel to be effective, the libeller had to be a person with a reputation – and this did not apply to Mr Burnham. She should not have treated him as a cabinet minister whose insolence could be damaging, but as a cheeky brat who deserved a clip on the ear.

Yet even if she was silly on this occasion, Shami Chakrabarti is a good egg. Like the Open University, the Liberty organisation is not a self-evidently Tory cause. But it makes an indispensable contribution to the national debate. The power of the state has grown, is growing and must be diminished. In recent years, no parliamentary session has been complete without several Bills creating new squadrons of snoopers, prodnoses and other official bullies, all with extensive powers to exact obedience from the ordinary citizen.

This government has not only passed the "whatever you are doing, stop it" Bill. It passes a new one every year. There used to be a great principle of English law, that whatever is not specifically prohibited is lawful. Labour has tried to get round that, by specifically prohibiting everything it can think of. Hence the requirement for Shami Chakrabarti.

We need a body which is always on the side of the small against the large, the individual against the state; of the freedoms which the British enjoy; against the little Hitlers of Brussels, Whitehall and several score council offices. We need an organisation which does not believe in original sin; which rejects Hobbes and insists that the natural condition of man is benign anarchy; which is death to the exigencies of order.

Such an organisation cannot always be allowed to prevail. Order does have its necessary exigencies. But it is vital that the Government should be probed, questioned, held to account; that it should have to win the argument for any new powers, rather than merely shovelling them on to the statute book via a whipped parliament.

We also need a pressure group to stand up for free speech; to live by the dictum which Voltaire may not have said, but should have: "I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it." In the US, the American Civil Liberties Union performs that role, buttressed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, enshrining free speech and free association.

In the Seventies, some Nazi supporters proposed to march through a suburb of Chicago that had many Jewish residents. Local legislators sought to prevent this. The ACLU relied heavily on Jewish donors and Jewish volunteers. Yet it went to court to defend the neo-Nazis' rights. In the UK, we could do with more of that saintly, heroic truculence in favour of unpopular opinion.

Except when provoked by Andy Burnham, Shami Chakrabarti is not truculent. But she is a necessary part of the argument. When Mr Davis has recovered from whatever it was that possessed him to force a by-election, he too might make a contribution. David Cameron could do worse than ask him to review the vast accretion of governmental powers in recent years.

In the late Forties and early Fifties, as the need for wartime austerity passed, Harold Wilson called for a bonfire of controls. The 1951 Conservative government implemented it. The next Tory government ought to blaze a new bonfire, of controls on freedom.

Some lefties have tried to yah-boo David Davis out of the debate because he has supported the death penalty and is in favour of a lower age limit for abortion. Why should either of those impugn his libertarian credentials? Why should it be impossible to believe in the ultimate penalty for the worst criminals and in freedom for the law-abiding? As for abortion, why should innocent foetuses be liable to capital punishment? Those who are in favour of human rights but neglect the rights of foetuses have forgotten their own origins, while anyone who is an enthusiast for abortion while denouncing the death penalty as vile is either a cretin or a hypocrite.

When considering the death penalty, we should also consider the alternatives. Matthew Parris, whose libertarian credentials are impeccable, used to support capital punishment. He argued that it was less offensive to human dignity to hang a man than to subject him to decades of imprisonment and counselling. These are interesting, complex questions. Mr Davis has given them thought and has shown willingness to take them seriously. Mr Burnham has not.

It is strange. Andy Burnham was at Cambridge. He cannot be thick. He must have weighed the big questions which underlie politics: the relationship of the individual to the state, the need to protect life while preserving the freedoms which make life living. Surely he cannot have progressed from youthful naivety to senescent cynicism without a brief, creative middle period? It is to be hoped that in future he will confine himself to the emancipating influence of culture.