Liberty

Via Anticant, this wonderful piece by Willem Buiter writing in the Financial Times:

The state is a necessary evil.  It is necessary for the reasons outlined by Hobbes, Locke and many other worldly philosophers.  It is evil because I know of no example of a state that has not abused its power over its citizens. 

Indeed. The state is merely a means by which individuals engage in collective action that they cannot manage alone – defence of the realm, for example, justice and policing would be another. It is not up to the state to encroach on private matters – what we eat, for instance, who we telephone would be another. It is not up to the state to gather the minutiae of our lives, because, frankly, that is not its remit and those matters are none of its business.

Every restriction on our liberties – our right to speak, write, criticize and offend as we please, to act and organize in opposition to the government of the day, to embarrass it and to show it up by forcing it to look into the mirror of its own leaked secrets – must be resisted. 

Quite so. However, Britons appear to have lost that ability. Indeed, there are idiots who think we should not be allowed to offend and would restrict freedom of speech accordingly.

We cannot afford to believe any government’s protestations that it is acting in good faith and will safeguard the confidentiality of any information it extracts from us.  Public safety and national security are never sufficient reasons for restricting the freedom of the citizens.  The primary duty of the state is to safeguard our freedom against internal and external threats.  The primary duty of an informed citizenry is to limit the domain of the state – to keep the government under control and to prevent it from becoming a threat to our liberties.

Again, I cannot argue with any of that – it is so spot on. Eternal vigilance against the state is the only guarantor of liberty. Unfortunately we now have a situation where a government has eroded those safeguards.

The better-intentioned a government professes to be, and the better-intentioned it truly is when it first gains office, the more it is to be distrusted.

Was there ever a better example of this than New Labour? Willem goes on to point this out:

After even the most liberal-minded, open-government-committed party takes hold of the reins of government, it takes never more than a single term of office, four years – five at the most – before paranoia takes over.   Disagreement becomes dissent, dissent becomes disloyalty, disloyalty becomes betrayal and betrayal becomes treason.  The public interest merges seamlessly with the private interest of the incumbents.  The state bureaucracy, where it has not been taken over by government loyalists on day one of the new administration, is gradually transformed into an arm of the government.  Some formal checks and balances often remain, parliament and the courts among them, but they too are often feeble to begin with and weaken further as the term office of the incumbent government lengthens.

I have watched this process at work in the UK since I returned here in 1994.  It was breath-taking and depressing to observe the transformation of New Labour after 1997, from the party of open government, human rights and civil liberties into an increasingly paranoid group of power-hogging and repressive political control freaks, who have done more damage to fundamental human rights in the past 11 years than any other (sequence of)  government(s)  in any comparable-length stretch of time since the Glorious Revolution.  Fortunately, despite their worst intentions, they have not been very competent – a more competent government could have done much more damage to our freedom and civil liberties.

There you have it; a decade of New Labour rule summed up accurately in a couple of paragraphs.

Anticant draws our attention to one of the comments by someone called Blissex:

New Labour’s major fault is that they are too poll driven (following rather than leading public opinion), and therefore they have been unwilling to resist the strong demand by a majority of the voters for more repression, less civil liberties, more state interference in private lives.

If you notice, the Tories have been campaigning for the same, but even further to the right, as it were.

The big driver is the growing number of elderly rentiers among voters, people who much prefer (the illusion of) safety to liberty, people who are just a little less authoritarian than the usual flog-n-hang them class.

ASBOs, CCTV, detention without trial, … are all wildly popular with voters, and every time the government or the opposition want to pander to buy themselves some votes without spending they propose new nasty attacks on liberty, especially the liberty of nasty young people to misbehave and irritate their elders.

The greatest threat to liberty is not the parties, which only do what the polls tell them, but voters, whose demand for practical fascism has driven a lot of politics in the USA and the UK (and several other countries, as in many the baby boom generation has reached middle and old age) over the past 2-3 decades.

These voters are sitting pretty, vested in careers, pensions, properties, and their main feeling is fear; they see all change as a threat, not an opportunity, a threat to their enjoyment of all they are vested in.

While I think that Blissex has it right on the matter of polls; it has become fashionable to blame the baby boomers for everything. I am a baby boomer (just). Most of my fellow older generation who are now in their fifties and sixties deplore what has happened. They deplore the erosion of civil liberties and the rule of law; the spying and prying, the meddling, hectoring, lecturing, nannying and patronising, the rampant bansturbation, and the pandering to the feckless and workshy and special interest groups. I suggest that Blissex looks a little closer to New Labour’s home turf for the answer to that one; their client vote; the burgeoning public sector, the welfare society and the ghettoised “minorities”.

The people who clamour for security over liberty are likely to be those too young to recall the consequences. The baby boomers lived through the cold war and those of us who did not support the Soviet Union understand all too well what we are losing and what we stood for. They (we) may once have loved New Labour for what it claimed to represent; you’ll find that many of us now despise it from the very depths of our souls.