Civil liberties

Undoubtedly one of the biggest issues of our time is the sustained attack on our civil liberties in recent decades. An important new book on this is reviewed in the Sunday Times.

I’ve got an article on civil liberties due out in first past the post sometime soon, and in it I mention a great book by Dominic Raab entitled ‘Assault on Liberty’, which I seriously recommend. A new work by Ben Wilson also looks like an important addition to the civil liberties debate. ‘What Price Liberty?’ is reviewed by Max Hastings in the Culture section of today’s paper:

‘Our almost manic craving for security, says Wilson, has “sapped liberties from various areas which once stood between the individual and the state… The concentration of power at the centre has made ministers the CEOs of national life.” Such is our dependence on government to provide solutions and ­remedies for every ill that “if something is wrong, the complaint goes straight to the top. Something must be done”.

This impacts with special force on the issue of terrorism. Ministers, security and police chiefs are haunted by knowledge that if an outrage takes place, they will be held accountable. They therefore go to extraordinary lengths, and introduce draconian legislation, to reduce risk. This includes measures designed to curb expressions of intolerance, above all by Islamic militants.

The consequence, says Wilson, is that the historic freedoms of British citizens are being curbed and indeed confiscated in a fashion hitherto deemed acceptable only in the face of Hitler’s invasion threat in 1940. In our obsession with making ourselves safer, we allow and in some degree incite our rulers to adopt disproportionate precautionary measures.

The author argues that governments have sought to resolve through legislation many problems of social integration that should instead have been addressed by leadership — explaining to citizens of all hues their rights and responsibilities in a free society. The Blair-Brown governments have elevated security to the highest good. They have shown themselves heedless of the fact that public safety extravagantly purchased is self-defeating. It destroys core values of the society it seeks to protect.

The book examines the threat to freedom posed by the fantastic weight of personal data about every citizen now available to government and corporate institutions. “Situational crime prevention” (SCP) has been around for a long time as a concept, but the authorities now possess unprecedented powers of scrutiny. “The implications are enormous,” says Wilson. “Like health and safety policies, SCP makes risk reduction a never-ending process. It makes precaution a non-ideological moral issue, something in the heart of our relations with other humans.”

A technology corporate executive shrugs off such warnings, saying: “You have zero privacy anyway — get over it.” But the evidence is overwhelming that if society concedes extravagant powers to government and law-enforcement agencies, they abuse them. It is essential to fight and keep fighting, to check the haemorrhage of liberties.’