Davis wins a battle, not the war

David Davis won; hardly a surprise given his opponents included the Church of the Militant Elvis. But what does his victory actually mean?

To the Labour party, it means nothing. Tony McNulty, a Home Office minister, stated that it was:

"...a vain stunt that became and remains a farce."

Which may be the way forward for any new by-election faced by the Labour party. Avoid crushing defeat by not participating. A bit like the posh kid with the expensive football who confiscates it from all the other kids in the playground and refuses to play because his team isn't winning.

Of course they miss the point that this by-election was fought on a point of principle. But then again, they never were going to understand that, were they? Principles for the Labour party is first and foremost a chain of dubious clothes stores.

Moving on, David Davis is obviously pleased that 17,113 people voted for him. I'm not surprised -the failure of having a credible opponent meant he very easily could have ended up with precisely no-one voting for him. Apparently this victory sends a:

"...stunning message to the government".

It certainly shows that there is not a bedrock of support for Labour policies - which hopefully the party already knew.

This is a far more interesting comment:

"We have fired a shot across the bows of Gordon Brown's arrogant, arbitrary and authoritarian government."

Particularly when backed up by this:

He said he would return to Westminster on Monday with a mandate "to fight Gordon Brown's vision of Big Brother Britain tooth and nail, to stop 42 days in its tracks, to prevent the disaster of ID cards before it happens, to protect our personal privacy from being ransacked by the ever-intrusive state".

Which, for me, is the point. This by-election was part point of principle, part stunt. It captured the public imagination, and Davis deserves his victory. But 42 days detention was still passed by the government. This by-election victory is not going to stop Brown et al from continuing to rape our civil liberties and crush freedom at every available opportunity. This must be the start of a campaign for civil liberties in the UK - not the end of it.

And the interesting moment will happen after the next General Election, when the Tories come to power. Whilst the Tories are instinctively less dictatorial than the Nu Labour control freaks, they still instinctively believe that a Tory led state is the answer to most problems. And when faced with terrorism, when faced with stabbings and other crimes, they will have to fight the instinct to eat away at our freedom in a desperate attempt to implement populist policies. Don't see the Tories as being the best people to fight for freedom in this country - after all, one of the first policies of the most recently elected Tory was to restrict freedom under the banner of fighting crime.

So that will be the challenge for David Davis - when his own party starts restricting freedom, how strong will his principles prove to be?