the path to liberty

Back in the days of yore the whigs as they where known then where the party of liberty. But they did not express this in the way that most modern parties do by attempting to legislate liberty, they recognised that to be at liberty is a persons natural state and so simply legislated to get rid of the government imposed restrictions on liberty.

They combed the Statute-book, and when they found a statute which bore against "the liberty of the subject" they simply repealed it and left the page blank. This purgation ran up into the thousands. In 1873 the secretary of the Law Society estimated that out of the 18,110 Acts which had been passed since the reign of Henry III, four-fifths had been wholly or partially repealed.

So that the Liberal Democrats seem to be groping their way back towards this method with The Freedom Bill, which I have blogged about before, should be applauded.