Comments on: Convention on Modern Liberty thoughts

By: Edward Crocker

Edward Crocker — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 01:53:02 +0000

great stuff. I’ve been trying to catch videos of the conference, but they don’t seem to have phillip pullman’s speech up, and some of the other videos are being annoying when I try to play them…
anyway I did watch michael will’s youtube intro prior to the conference and I was struck by how his little speech sort of encapsulated the problem with labour’s thinking re. civil liberties: wills references the difficult balance between freedom and security. no! it’s meant to be a balance between one type of freedom (positive) and another (negative) i.e. how far do you increase people’s freedom before the harm caused to their negative freedoms outweighs the good allegedly given to them by the opportunities and choices that the positive freedom has presented them with. this is basic stuff! why does no-one get this??? (actually that’s why I particularly want to watch all the videos of the conference – so I can watch the more sensible people there who do get it )
also watched dominic grieve’s speech. we must be careful not to let tories like dominic grieve be the trojan horse through which the party at large gets to go back to their old authoritarian ways. still, pretty tight speech

By: Mark Brough

Mark Brough — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:34:36 +0000

Yeah as you noted that question (on how much people really care) was raised in the first plenary. The response was basically: make human rights relevant to them. The interesting thing is that while people react badly to “human rights”, or even more so, the Human Rights Act, when asked about the rights themselves they react very positively. I certainly don’t think they care about human rights more than the economy, but perhaps they can be woven into the Tories’ current narrative of an overreaching state? Or else the “British sense of fair play”, as difficult as that may be to pin down…

I think Labour basically thinks that the destruction of civil liberties is what everyone wants. Why should perverts, racists, suspected terrorists and other assorted ’sickos’ be granted these rights? Why shouldn’t they be sacrificed for the greater good? The answer of course is that this is not only incredibly simplistic and intellectually infantile but that ignoring their intrinsic human dignity demeans all of us. I think the only way of making it an issue of national interest is really to emphasise, explain and argue that a commitment to human rights and individual freedom are what (at least in the past) marked us out as exceptional in the world.

I don’t think the Tories are the answer, but I also think that we shouldn’t forget that Labour has similar (if less overtly stated) commitment to a British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, which would take the place of the HRA. I think the problem with this is that it will be used as an excuse to create more obligations of the citizen towards the state. At the same time though, Timothy Garton Ash pointed out the benefits of a BBoR in that it would create something which people could relate to; a lot of people obviously don’t relate to the current HRA, or feel that it in some way “belongs” to them. So I’m suspicious that it would be used to water down the current HRA (which I think is already too weak), but it could be advantageous in increasing popular support for the protection of fundamental freedoms.

As for the long hot summer stuff- pretty skeptical, given that it did first appear in the Express! But I guess anything could (and often does) happen…

By: Mark Bailey

Mark Bailey — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:06:03 +0000

What do you think about the chances of a “long hot summer”, Mark? There are rumblings that the army are being pre-warned that they might be deployed to UK streets if things get really bad (admittedly, only from a source as credible as the Express as yet). A confluence of events like recession, increasing xenophobia (“British jobs….”), the G20, EP elections (BNP?) and Govt fall from grace surely has the potential for a huge curbing of civil liberties? Or is the talk of summer rioting overdone, do you think?

By: Entangled Alliances at the Convention on Modern Liberty | Entangled Alliances

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:43:53 +0000

[...] at Twitter and in a knee-jerk reaction deleted my account. sorry! (there’s an aftermath post here). This entry was posted on Saturday, February 28th, 2009 at 10:38. You can follow any responses [...]

By: Mark Bailey

Mark Bailey — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 18:49:22 +0000

This is really fascinating and insightful stuff Mark! So much to come back on, and I should probably read it in more detail…

Interesting implication about the monarchy and civil liberties. Despite my own inclinations, I’m also not sure that civil liberties are harmed too much by constitutional monarchy (how very 18th century of me, I know) and electoral reform too, surely plays a role.

I do wonder, as you pointed out in your tweeting, the extent to which people do care, though? Although I wholeheartedly disagree with Michael Wills, there also seems to be cognitive dissonance on the side of liberal-left. The Guardian argues “Today’s Convention on Modern Liberty showed that the British public are more than ready to defend their freedoms” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/feb/28/convention-modern-liberty-britain). Really? Are Sun readers really that bothered? Do the swing bloc who decide elections really think about civil liberties anywhere near as much as they do the economy? I don’t think this has much to do with Labour’s fall from grace, although it certainly does explain its break from the Intellectual Left. How then DO you make this an issue of national interest (which, of course, it rightly should be)?

And are the Tories really the answer? Getting rid of the Human Rights Act for some ill-defined Bill of Rights (Cameron’s the leader, not Grieve, after all) just looks like an attempt to court disillusioned libertarians while fulfilling a long-standing aim to abolish the HRA. Nice little twofer…?