David Goodhart raises an important point in Prospect about much of the debate about civil liberty.
We are not living in a police state. Not even a remotely authoritarian one. In fact we, all of us, have never enjoyed so much liberty—personal, political and legal. Yet to assert this view sets one at odds with a large part of liberal opinion in Britain.
…the combination of new technology and the ever rising expectations that the public have of state services means that we are unavoidably living in a new era of the database state, and a cool, technocratic debate is required to establish its parameters. The shrill politicisation of the liberty lobby makes this harder.
…by turning these complex, technical debates into a story of noble defenders of liberty versus cynical, power-grabbing tyrants (whether politicians or officials) the liberty lobby reinforce the lazy anti-politics of the age.
I would not for a minute claim that there aren’t serious matters that need to be discussed about the freedoms we enjoy in this country. Therein, however, lies my problem: much of the discussion we have is not serious. Instead it focuses more around the hyperbolic crafting of an oppositional identity that requires the government to be not just wrong, but malevolent. In this sort of world-view, opponents are no longer people whose ideas you respectfully disagree with, but an evil cabal hell-bent on the destruction of whatever values you particularly cherish.
I’ve spent enough time looking at police states and repressive regimes through history to know that we are not currently living in one. The events of this week, in many ways, confirm it. Were we living in a police state:
- Damian Green would not be in the papers;
- You wouldn’t be able to read Guido;
- McBride and Draper’s antics would look like a schoolboy prank;
- The G20 marches would not have happened;
- Ian Tomlinson would have been hit far worse than he allegedly was;
- There would be no footage of the above;
- There would be no IPCC investigation or second autopsy;
- I would not be sitting here writing this.
The truth is that Britain is a much freer country than it was at the beginning of the 20th century. The talk of “ancient liberties” is something of a retconned fantasy. It ignores that much of the country could not vote until 1832, that women were unable to do so until 1919. The idea that we live in an unprecedented age where the government snoops on everything we do is patently absurd. It was only in the 1980s that the intelligence and security apparatus of this country were even officially acknowledged, let alone regulated or curtailed within the parameters of the rule of law. The Post Office, far from being the beloved institution it now is for so many, was created as a massive interception operation, established to allow the crown to read the correspondence of its subjects. The sheer scale of data exchanged every day on the internet virtually guarantees your anonymity and privacy: there is simply too much information out there for the 5,500 GCHQ staff to even want to sift through it all. Stasi-style monitoring of all citizens’ correspondence in a western democracy is no longer feasible or desired. Yes, liberty should be considered as part of an historic tradition, and policy should err on the side of favouring that tradition, but it ignores the fact that liberty remains at all times an unsettled question.
What we live under is not McCarthyism, nor is it Nazism, nor the Stasi, nor Zimbabwe-esque brutality. To claim it is diminishes the suffering and seriousness of these blots on history, and invites comparisons so clearly absurd as to undermine the very cause one wishes to promote.
I write this not because I wish to oppose the libertarian side of the argument, but because this dogmatic intransigence is counter-productive. I have severe problems with the liberal implications of some government policy. I’ve blogged about them before, and I will probably do so in the future. 42 days, ID cards, witness anonymity, loosely-written “enabling” legislation, curtailment of right to trial by jury and so forth all pose serious problems. Labour’s tendency to favour bureaucratic command-and-control centralisation over private initiative is something I deeply resent. Nonetheless I can also accept that some changes are necessary as the result of social, technological and political developments. I can also see that in some cases these are not clear-cut issues, and ultimately both sides of the argument can be “liberal”.
The problem though is that the argument is unbalanced. Rights do not exist as pure idealised abstracts, but have to be applied to a changing political context. Rights can and do conflict, and societies have to decide how they prioritise them: does the right to life trump all others, or are there some rights for which one should be willing to die? If so, which, and at what point? In this there are no fixed and certain answers that will hold true for all time. It is a question which requires revisiting because the context continually changes. Unfortunately, suggesting this can earn you immensely disapproving looks for the mere suggestion that it might be acceptable for governments to adapt to changing circumstances. The counter-argument often misquotes Benjamin Franklin’s remarks about the trade-off between liberty and security, but it mischaracterises the nature of his remarks. Franklin never said that no liberty was ever tradable for security: he specifically referred to the sacrifice of ‘essential liberty’. That extra word makes a vast amount of difference. The question then becomes not one of a dogmatic defence of the status quo on the basis of abstract principles, but the questioning of what liberty is essential, and what is either luxurious or outdated.
In practice, liberty is frequently compromised. Nobody seriously entertains the idea that al-Qaeda should be allowed to organise in this country under the protections of freedom of association. Hoax 999 callers are liable for criminal prosecution even though they are speaking freely. We willingly accept such restrictions because in both those examples it is clear that the rights claimed (freedom of speech and assembly) are of a lesser value to others society wishes to protect (life). The problem however comes, as Goodhart’s article explains, in the more complex and nuanced aspects of government policy.
There are big challenges ahead—such as who should be on the DNA database, and how the new database to monitor web use should be overseen—and the government has not set out clear and principled positions on these or many other aspects of the database state. It is also true that parts of the state, in particular the police and local authorities, sometimes take a cavalier attitude to the existing protections.
These are serious matters that require serious and nuanced responses. Shrill utterances of “ancient liberties”, “in my day” and “police state” do the debate a great disservice and simply concede the argument to the authoritarians. Instead of critically engaging with the ideas of thinkers such as Locke, Paine and Mill, criticising them where they go wrong, evaluating principles and applying them to a different historic context, we end up stuck with an inflexible parroting of their ideas shorn of context. We hear all the great quotes, misquotes, soundbites, abstractions and theory, but we almost never hear their adaptation or application, save for discovering which piece of legislation someone dislikes this week. Where, amidst the mini-spat over governments monitoring facebook, did any pragmatic discussion arise? The failure of many to even acknowledge that there may be a reason governments want to monitor facebook other than to institute dictatorship is simply not good enough. It ignores the genuine problems such policies are created to address. Uncomfortably, some of those solutions may still require us to reconsider what is actually the essence of our liberty, and what is but a luxurious manifestation. Failure to engage or compromise simply leaves liberty out in the cold, ensuring it gets no hearing whatsoever.
Liberty requires and deserves a defence that is not just robust, but pragmatic, nuanced and intelligent. Extremism in the defence of liberty is a vice, for it virtually guarantees its demise. It’s time we saw a little more pragmatism, and a little less rhetoric.
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