This week sees the opening of The Convention on Modern Liberty which starts on Saturday in London, with other sessions following in cities all over the country. The convention will present an attempt to catalogue the liberties the public has given away, in a list compiled by the University College Law School Human Rights Programme. I'll be following the deliberations.
It has come to something when a liberal journalist like Timothy Garton Ash, writing in the Guardian on Thursday on the continuing erosion of Civil Liberties ends his column, To be honest, I still cannot quite believe this is happening in my country. It feels like a bad dream. But it is happening, and we must stop it. Now
Dream indeed. It's necessary to step back for a moment to see what has been happening here. By small but significant increments, three Labour governments, each one a more distant parody of what was once called the Labour Movement than the last, have escorted us by the oxter sleepwalking towards a surviellance state. No less than three thousand new crimes have been put on the statute books. It's precisely because there has been no significant public opposition to these steps, coupled with a reluctance to see them as incremental, that the state has been able to get away with it. Given the chance, ruling elites will always use available technologies to increase the reach of their control. When people cease to value their liberties, they can easily be persuaded to give them up.
Two recent, though perhaps forgotten, incidents come to mind.
Last summer the West Country police took it upon themselves to ban a rock concert by the band Babyshambles, on the ludicrous grounds that the performers might deliberately seek to 'wind up' the audience, leading to a situation where Public Order offences might be committed. The band's frontman, Pete Docherty, is a notable tabloid buffoon and scapegoat, and many hack hours have been deployed by the gutter press in inciting mass disapproval of the man's personal life. The police of course took this into consideration, knowing that they could do as they liked so far as Docherty and his mates were concerned. Predictably, there was no liberal outrage at the police walking all over civil liberties on such a flimsy pretext. Now the police have a precedent to ban any gathering they care to on similar grounds. State 1, People 0.
Then earlier in the year a brave soul took it into his head to walk from Lands End to John 'oGroats bollock naked. For aesthetic reasons he'd resolved to stay clear of cities and towns, and ramble only along the least travelled paths. Every now and then there was press and television coverage showing the man being arrested and bundled into a police van covered with a blanket.
I developed a great admiration for this sturdy and deeply tanned feller. He refused to wear clothes in the police cells, and as soon as the police let him go he resolutely took up his walking staff and went on his way. He simply wanted to walk the country bollock naked.
My ancestor, William Blake, had a similar disregard for clothing, and would have celebrated the naked rambler as a token of Liberty. During the Civil War years more radical brothers and sisters went naked into churches to expose the Hypocrisy of Religion. So you see we have a tradition of bollock naked dissent going back hundreds of years. In 2009 we no longer cherish it.
It has come to something when a liberal journalist like Timothy Garton Ash, writing in the Guardian on Thursday on the continuing erosion of Civil Liberties ends his column, To be honest, I still cannot quite believe this is happening in my country. It feels like a bad dream. But it is happening, and we must stop it. Now
Dream indeed. It's necessary to step back for a moment to see what has been happening here. By small but significant increments, three Labour governments, each one a more distant parody of what was once called the Labour Movement than the last, have escorted us by the oxter sleepwalking towards a surviellance state. No less than three thousand new crimes have been put on the statute books. It's precisely because there has been no significant public opposition to these steps, coupled with a reluctance to see them as incremental, that the state has been able to get away with it. Given the chance, ruling elites will always use available technologies to increase the reach of their control. When people cease to value their liberties, they can easily be persuaded to give them up.
Two recent, though perhaps forgotten, incidents come to mind.
Last summer the West Country police took it upon themselves to ban a rock concert by the band Babyshambles, on the ludicrous grounds that the performers might deliberately seek to 'wind up' the audience, leading to a situation where Public Order offences might be committed. The band's frontman, Pete Docherty, is a notable tabloid buffoon and scapegoat, and many hack hours have been deployed by the gutter press in inciting mass disapproval of the man's personal life. The police of course took this into consideration, knowing that they could do as they liked so far as Docherty and his mates were concerned. Predictably, there was no liberal outrage at the police walking all over civil liberties on such a flimsy pretext. Now the police have a precedent to ban any gathering they care to on similar grounds. State 1, People 0.
Then earlier in the year a brave soul took it into his head to walk from Lands End to John 'oGroats bollock naked. For aesthetic reasons he'd resolved to stay clear of cities and towns, and ramble only along the least travelled paths. Every now and then there was press and television coverage showing the man being arrested and bundled into a police van covered with a blanket.
I developed a great admiration for this sturdy and deeply tanned feller. He refused to wear clothes in the police cells, and as soon as the police let him go he resolutely took up his walking staff and went on his way. He simply wanted to walk the country bollock naked.
My ancestor, William Blake, had a similar disregard for clothing, and would have celebrated the naked rambler as a token of Liberty. During the Civil War years more radical brothers and sisters went naked into churches to expose the Hypocrisy of Religion. So you see we have a tradition of bollock naked dissent going back hundreds of years. In 2009 we no longer cherish it.
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