Are we killing liberty?

The modern world creates new realities incomprehensible to previous generations, with profound effects for which we could not have been prepared, to which we have thus responded badly.

The rise of the internet, hundred-channel television, an extensive satellite network and mobile telephones has created a new age of instant global communications, a dissemination of information on an unparalleled scale. This decade saw a widening of popular access to information that makes the invention of the Gutenberg press seem small beer. That access is perhaps the greatest liberator in human history, making redundant authoritarian regimes’ mechanisms for controlling the media and silencing criticism. Yet the same power that guarantees opposition and dissent also poses a huge threat to liberty.

By overcoming distance and a day-by-day focus, the global 24 hour new cycle has abandoned perspective, thorough analysis and reasoned judgment. In their place come instant disclosure of undeveloped stories; a constant drip-feed of both allegations and facts, and irrational assertion of emotive responses.

Informing the masses of horrifying crimes brings to their homes a fear of the gruesome never likely to impact upon their lives. The horror of a child murdered dominates the thoughts of parents at the opposite end of the country. A rise in knife crime in Manchester becomes a concern in Aberdeen. A fearful and angry populace is a dangerous thing, for the greatest threat to liberty has always been the authoritarian impulse of an impassioned majority.

Positive developments can have very negative consequences. Modern medicine preserved life in defiance of disease but created suffering in the unprecedented phenomenon of degenerative illness. Modern communications technology opened access to information and knowledge, but does it risk a progressive decline in human freedom? The loss of liberty is rarely the result of speedy revolution. Freedom tends to die by a thousand cuts.

Taken individually many laws are no doubt justifiable: But the collective effect is a society with restrictions and punishments that previous generations would have, in abhorrence, labeled oppressive.

It is now a crime to regularly give your friend’s kids a lift to football practice without a criminal records check. Two female police officers were threatened with prosecution for babysitting each others children too often. A 60 year old man was jailed for 3 years on a tax offence: Even the judge doubted his guilt, but the Crown froze his assets so he could not pay an accountant to access the records proving his innocence.

Since 1997 over 3,000 new offences have been created: 1,472 can result in imprisonment. The UK now incarcerates more of its people than any developed country other than America. The Labour government is guilty only of responding to public demand, and David Cameron shows little sign of doing things differently. The fault ultimately lies not with our politicians but in ourselves. In a democracy the people get the government they deserve. One day the children we seek to protect may turn and ask what we did with their liberty.