Liberty

David Llewellyn (from Cardiff, Wales) has a great entry on his blog from Thursday, December 13, 2007, on the Telegraph:

Last night I watched Chris Atkins' excellent documentary 'Taking Liberties'. My first suggestion of the day, to anyone who's reading, is that you do likewise as soon as you possibly can. About five minutes into the film I turned to a friend and said, "I have a feeling I'm going to be very angry by the time this is over."

I wasn't wrong.

The documentary charts the way in which Tony Blair and the Labour Government have chiselled away at rights and liberties that have been entrenched in British life for best part of a millenia. It starts by following a group of convoy of anti-war protestors as they make their way toward a military base in Gloucester, only to find themselves met by a police road block, physically forced back onto their coaches, and then escorted back to London. What starts as mild farce (many of the protestors are rather sweet, dotty old women) quickly becomes increasingly sinister, like a scene from Terry Gilliam's film 'Brazil'.

From there it shows the different areas of public life which have been affected by Blair's rampant Orwellian ambitions, from ID cards to CCTV, from extended periods of detention without charge to the shredding up of habeus corpus.

One thing that struck me while watching the film is the fact that this has happened, and it has happened quickly, because so many people in this country have operated under the assumption that any change in the law would not affect them. The extended periods of detention are a good example of this. Many white, indigenous Brits were blase about, if not supportive of Blair's attempts to extend police detention to 90 days because neither they nor anyone they cared about was likely to fall foul of this change to the law, or so they thought. When the right to process anywhere near parliament was taken away, many assumed it would only effect those woolly, pinko anti-war types, with their dreadlocks and their marijuana and what-have-you.

Of course, this isn't the case.

Anti-terror and anti-protest legislation have been used to arrest and persecute people from all walks of life, from anti-war protestors to the never-convicted suspects in the Wood Green Ricin-that-wasn't-there case of 2003. The reason
Blair and Labour have been able to get away with trampling all over our rights
and liberties is that the groups are so disparate they've never thought the laws
would affect them. It's hard to imagine many in the pro-hunt lobby having a
great deal of sympathy for the suspect still under Kafkaesque house arrest after
four years, and similarly hard to imagine that any of those campaigning for his
freedom having a great deal of sympathy for fox hunters.

The laws enabling the US to essentially snatch people from this country and drag them to the States were something that would only ever effect alleged fundamentalists, or so the general public assumed, until the case of the Natwest 3. What people need to wake up and realise is that any change in the law is never race or religion specific. These changes to the law are quite blind to class, skin colour, age, and creed. Any law that affects them (whoever your 'them' might be) affects you too.

...We might not have a situation comparable to that in Zimbabwe, Iran, or Saudi Arabia just yet, but this does not mean we should brush away these issues with sentiments such as, "Well, if you've got nothing to hide", or "Well, it doesn't affect us, does it?"

The point is, it does affect you. A few years ago I had a partner who was Bulgarian, who had grown up under communist rule. Though he was only 11 years old when Zhivkov was kicked out of office, he could still remember his father and uncles, sat around the dining room table, talking in hushed voices for fear that the neighbours might hear their anti-Communist sentiments. Right now it is practically illegal to stand outside Westminster and say anything that might be construed as anti-government. How long before that exclusion zone of dissent has extended as
far as your front door, and beyond?