| 2007-10-30 |
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| Written by Tim Worstall | |
| Monday, 29 October 2007 | |
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Two markedly different views of Gordon Brown's recent speech on liberty. Matthew D'Ancona thinks it cunning and learned while Henry Porter subjects it to hoots of derision .
I side with Porter here, indeed, given the similarities between simian
and human nature, I'm surprised not to see the extension from hoots to
bottom baring and faeces slinging (although I have no doubt some blog
somewhere is doing exactly that). The way in which Brown has the wrong end of the stick is I think summed up in this line recorded by D'Ancona: "Precious as it is," he said on Thursday, "liberty is not the only value we prize and not the only priority for government."Well, no, of course liberty isn't the only priority for government. It's not a priority of any kind at all for government, not even an interest. Governance would be a great deal simpler if we were all monitored all the time, had barcodes stamped on our foreheads, were only allowed to act in a small number of authorised ways and did only what we were told to. Liberty is of course the opposite of all of those things and thus liberty and the priorities of government are in constant tension: almost opposites of each other. If we're going to start the debate about civil liberties, about a written constitution, from this fallacious point then we're never going to get to the real point of either of them. A constitution tells us what the State may not do to us. It describes the civil liberties that we enjoy, which may not be taken from us, whatever the priorities of government. It absolutely is not about what we may do, it is about what they may not do to us. And as the sad and violent history of the 20th century tells us, if we forget that the State is the most dangerous enemy of our liberty then we'll have neither freedom nor security, nor perhaps will we deserve either.
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