Liberty

A nice article in the Guardian of all places about Labour's assault on liberty, and the approach of Labour's apologists (a certain Mr Harding springs to mind).

His [Jack Straw's] approach to Labour's programme against liberty is simply to deny that it ever existed - which is to say that water flows uphill. This is not a matter of interpretation, but calculated propaganda, and the readers knew it. In the hours following publication, he was taken apart on the Guardian's Comment is Free blog about his failure to mention such things as ID cards, the restrictions on protest and the building of the database state.

It also includes this paragraph on positive and negative liberty, something that briefly surfaced in the Bloggertarian spat a little while ago.

The key sentences come from a feline passage in the middle of his article. 'We have "freedoms to" do things in a free society,' he wrote, 'but "freedoms from" as well. Freedoms from fear, crime and terrorism.' It is this notion of 'freedoms from' that has enabled the attack on liberty. Because people's fears are infinite it follows that Labour's urge to legislate is inexhaustible.

Which was exactly the point that Isaiah Berlin was making when he defined positive and negative liberty, that the positive kind where the state intercedes to give freedom from something all to often ends up with the state freeing you from freedom itself. This is why positive liberty and state gifted positive rights are so often not liberty at all, merely electoral bribes.