I published this article today in the U.K. on The First Post, and on The Huffington Post.
Freedom-wise, there’s nowhere more self-satisfied than Britain. Bastion of personal liberty, home of the ground-breaking Magna Carta, the place where the sturdy yeoman can sit under his thatched roof secure from the intrusions of the king…
Pull the other one. Any sentient citizen must realise that in terms of liberty, the country has less than a state-of-the-art democracy; in fact, it’s been coasting on its reputation.
Now, thanks to a slavishly Bush-poodling Labour government with a startlingly authoritarian bent, Britons are beginning to recognise that this sceptred isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden is about to become this surveillance state, this database depot, this green and pleasant centre of preventive detention, this precious home of biometrically-keyed national identification cards set in a sea of CCTV cameras.
The government’s appetite to maintain detailed files on its citizens is growing
But Britons are getting a chance to have their own democratic moment. On Saturday February 28, lawyers, judges, politicians, human rights supporters, anti-surveillance activists, members of the Countryside Alliance, rock ‘n’ rollers denied the right to stage concerts of their own choosing (honestly) and presumably more than a few ordinary concerned citizens will be gathering all across the UK – in London of course, but also in Belfast, Bristol, Cardiff, Cambridge, Glasgow and Manchester – at the Convention on Modern Liberty.
There they will hear from a roster of speakers that will include Shami Chakrabarti, Henry Porter, Helena Kennedy and David Davis. And they will learn more about the ever encroaching threats to individual liberty that have been fuelled by government’s growing appetite to keep its citizens under constant watch and maintain detailed files on what they do. It may not be as dramatic as the storming of the Bastille, but it’s a start.
And a start that might learn from the USA. A new, more American-like legal recognition of individual rights would be a welcome update for what is still, just, one of the world’s leading democracies. Not that it could prevent all transgressions, as the Bush-Cheney administration amply demonstrated. But such a change would bring about a fundamental alteration in the relationship between the people and the government.
In Britain, the people have always been subservient to the government. Power was first invested in the king, who, the citizenry was told, received it from God. Over the centuries the king’s authority was gradually ceded to Parliament.
And though it’s true that Parliament is elected by the people, the relative infrequency of elections – contrast with the US where a third of the Senate and the entire House of Representatives is contested every two years – and the power of party discipline mean that voters can yelp and squawk and scream and march in their millions but be safely ignored by the ruling class.
Americans’ suspicion of government survives across the political spectrum
As for rebels… Well, there’s Oliver Cromwell, who asserted the rights of Parliament, but after he died, the monarchy was restored, and wasn’t the restoration more fun? And there was, it’s true, the Glorious Revolution, though that should have been called the Clever Revolution, for the smart way one monarch was swapped in for another. But many hardcore malcontents just upped and left.
And many of them came to America, where one can more plausibly say that the people rule. They overthrew one government (citing “inalienable rights”’) and created the next one (in the name of “We, the People”). The Constitution they wrote treated government with extreme suspicion, and they shackled it with checks and balances and separated powers and a firm Bill of Rights that prohibited the government from making laws that limited individual liberty.
Today, that suspicion of government survives across the political spectrum: the left is wary of official police powers, the right of spreading, meddlesome, freedom-squelching bureaucracy. The result is a highly individualistic culture, one that constantly mythologises outlaws (Jesse James, Vito Corleone), self-appointed vigilantes (Dirty Harry, Spiderman), and the freelance rebel who climbs onto a motorcycle and goes on the road or jumps aboard his raft and heads down the Mississippi.
With all its problems and difficulties, the pull of this individual freedom has been felt throughout the world – as it will be in the UK on February 28. It’s time to take a stand. It’s time to summon up the shades of such great British reformers as William Wilberforce and his fellow abolitionists. It’s time to realise that Britain needs to make real something it already thinks is right. It’s time, in fact, for the UK’s very own Bill of Rights.
Many readers commented when The First Post published this article:
Well said. NewLabour has been the most oppressively authoritarian government ever, and will be evicted into the wilderness again at the next election. Whether the encroachments on our liberty will be rolled back by the next lot though is doubtful. But we’ll see.
Posted by Peter Simmons at 11:44am on February 26, 2009
I strongly agree. Information is routinely misused, shared inappropriately – and sought inappropriately. The naive assumption is that UK governments protect individual interests and are not and will never be despotic. MP’s seem very relaxed about an emergent data gathering and sharing strategy which leaves individual citizens at extraordinary risk. A Bill of Rights would at least provide a rationale and legal framework for citizens.
Posted by dexy at 12:38pm on February 26, 2009
When you have your long-overdue revolution, I would love to see crowds of the people, gleefully stomping the guts out of those Big Brother cameras. Next, destroy the databases. Remember, we surround them.
Posted by Big Bear at 7:34pm on February 26, 2009
Its about time…When you turned away the Dutch man and denied him free speech and expression I thought England is no more. You allow a bunch of immigrants run your churches, schools, newspapers, radio stations and are so busy worrying about offending this group or that group, you have lost your rights to Free Expression and free speech, you lose that and you lose your ..and I say your country. You have nothing left but you Freedom to change things to act on situations, you cannot please Everyone..this is England, first, for Gods sake protect her. Your liberals need to live in Cuba for a year, then and only then can they comment on Freedoms…it is your most Valued gift as a nation.
Posted by Terrylee Moore at 9:47pm on February 26, 2009
To my British friends I implore you to fiercely push back against this infringement of privacy rights and ongoing erosion of civil liberties in order to placate those who use political correctness as a weapon against you. My friends in the UK tell me how they have had to move to small towns that they had never imagined to ever life in due to how extreme the march for political correctness and ‘safety’ has gotten. Best of luck. Many of us are rooting for you over here.
Posted by John Doe at 10:33pm on February 26, 2009
Laws and systems allegedly introduced to protect us against ‘terrorism’ are already being used against the citizenry. Meanwhile new and vastly expensive security projects such as ID cards are planned in our increasingly paranoid country. The claim that they ensure our security is laughable. Our loss of liberty is not worth the unmeasured and unproven protection claimed by politicians whose motives remain suspect. It will get a lot worse and increasingly difficult to reverse if the public does not realise what it is losing and act. My paranoia means that I fear that I will now appear on some ‘black list’ for writing this.
Posted by Donald Brown at 10:36pm on February 26, 2009
Thank you for the original article, “Shriviled Liberty”. Aristotle, the ancient and esteemed Greek philosopher, stated in his book, “Politics”, that a democratic form of government without adequate republican ( equal rights concommitant with equal responsibilities for all citizens) safe guards was one of the worst forms of government. He stated that the same was tantamount to a tyranny of the majority such that the electoral majority simply grants itself political and economic preferences and places duties on and removes rights from the electoral minority. In essence, in the UK and the USA ,the electoral majority is women and the electoral minority is men. The deprivation of long standing civil liberties and personal liberties are a natural consequence of the same as a requisite of both maintaining and inhancing this electoral tyranny. Since this form of government is essentially a “tyranny”, the “political establishment” which represents the same must utelize authoritarian means to maintain an oppressive unjust system which has as it’s goals “authoritarian ends”. I agree with those in the UK that the UK needs it’s own written “Bill of Rights” similar to the American Bill of Rights such that individual rights and liberties in the UK will be more definitively and adequately protected and promulgated. I wish those that demonstrate for this purpose in the UK the greatest success in their endeavor to both protect and inhance civil liberties and rights in the UK!
Posted by C.V. Shaw at 1:00am on February 27, 2009
Tell them to shove their CCTVs up their wrinkled bums. The United States is heading in the same direction…doesn’t help much that our populace has become a herd of lobotomized lemmings. Government is like a raging river, if we don’t dam it up it will quickly erode all our liberties. We have government meddling to thank for our worldwide economic crisis. Now they claim to be able to fix it!