The historic struggle for liberty

Protecting liberty has never been so important, as its language and traditions are eroded in an age driven by utility

"New, new, new! Everything is new," Tony Blair marvelled at the beginning of his premiership. How wonderful to be liberated from the dead hand of history. Dazzled by the pace of progress and haunted by the apocalyptic horrors of modern terrorism, it was little wonder that civil liberties became just another puzzling inheritance from the past. As Blair said in a debate with Henry Porter about confronting antisocial behaviour and terrorism, and introducing ID cards: "For me, this is not an issue of liberty but of modernity."

But then came Gordon Brown. "It is the challenge and the opportunity for our generation," he said in a speech in 2007, "to write the next chapter of British liberty in a way that honours the progress of the past – and promises a wider and more secure freedom to our children."

History seemed to be back at the forefront of politics. But as Richard Reeves argued recently, Brown is torn between veneration for liberty – as his speech showed – and an instinct for control. You don't need me to tell you which won the struggle for the prime minister's troubled soul.

Arguing for the restoration of history in this matter I do not mean searching for a golden age of liberty to provide a template for our times. I also do not mean searching, necessarily, for a fixed meaning of liberty from which we should not deviate. What I mean is a way of thinking about liberty, a way that frees us from the constraints of the present – and to this end this series presents a brief history of the twisting road to liberty in Britain, examining protest, privacy and the relationship between citizens and the state.

A part of all of us craves intellectual certainty. We want a rule book to guide us through stormy times – an absolute sense of liberty to restrain governments and write our own rights in tablets of stone. David Blunkett famously scoffed at "airy-fairy" civil liberties. And indeed every society is confronted by seemingly incompatible demands in the name of freedom. Some people see any interference by the state as an intrusion on the sacred rights of the individual. Others are seduced into the belief that economic freedoms are akin to natural freedom. There are those who regard the curtailment of supposedly transient economic and political rights as justified if it leads to the higher good of equality. And in our times people have been prepared to trade liberty for security.

In truth all these arguments jostle together, and have always done so without being fully reconciled. The predominance of one would be fatal. There can be no perfect resolution between the claims of society and the rights of the individual, between outcomes that are determined by the state and by the market, between complete autonomy and a level of compulsion, between civil liberties and safety. In this light liberty might look patchy and inconsistent. So be it. Life is messy. The search for liberty is painful. The best that can be hoped is that a society, guided by its traditions, can make room for the negotiation of the maximum amount of liberty for the individual. In searching for a definition of liberty we might very well say it is that never-ending process of political negotiation that takes account of the needs of society and the rights of the individual. This can only happen in a society where politicians and citizens agree that individual rights are at the centre of politics, not some "airy-fairy" concept beloved of the chattering classes. To say that is to duck out of a crucial debate which is indispensable for the health of any society.

It is in the study of history that we can see the contradictions and compromises at the heart of any society's search for liberty. In this country there was no serene progress towards freedom. Essential rights were more often won as a result of guerrilla war rather than glorious, conclusive victories in set-piece battles. The search for liberty, then, was a result of direct experience – individuals, most of them forgotten, who stood up against the state or against private interests. It is in these biographies that we can define liberty, and the twisty route to it. It is made real to us in the tales of heroic resistance and tragic abuses, not in the declarations of philosophers or prophets.

Throughout much of history it has been a sense of the past that has nurtured a commitment to basic civil liberties such as habeas corpus, the freedom of the press or the right to strike. Any expansion of state powers was looked on with great suspicion. The onus was on politicians to explain why a benevolent reform that trespassed on individual rights was worth the sacrifice. As Bob Marshall-Andrews put it:

The British do not articulate liberties easily any more than they define them in lists or guard them as properties or beneficence gratefully received from their masters above. For us, political and personal freedoms are not gifts or indulgences, they are defining characteristics as a nation.

Liberty is a perpetual struggle which every generation must confront anew. At a time when technology has made surveillance child's play and when new pressures are put on free speech it is never so important. In confronting these challenges we need to muster all our powers of imagination and experience to negotiate new protections. This does not work when politicians dismiss the plea of liberty as irrelevant. It also does not work when the public is fatalistic or lulled into thinking liberty belongs in the history pages.

But we live in an age driven by utility, not principle. The language and traditions of liberty are being erased from our political and popular cultures and so the government – unrestrained by a sense of constitutional propriety and unafraid of offending voters sensibilities – is free to do what all governments tend to do: swell and push into new areas like a force of nature. For the same reasons its employees feel less embarrassment at acting like bullies or officious prefects.

The twisting road to liberty illuminates just how vital and complex the debate is today. While history has boomed as part of the entertainment industry it has faded from politics and education. It can be no surprise that this has coincided with three decades in which civil and political liberties have suffered.

Source: The Guardian