Today did not show that everything in the civil libertarian garden is rosy. I am not naive. Leila Deen will doubtless come under greater surveillance as a result of today's escapade. But it was a reminder that the assault on freedom does not have the universal upper hand. We live in a complicated and contradictory society, in which some freedoms are threatened and others are not only not threatened but – take the case of sexual freedom – markedly less threatened than they once were. And it ought to remind us that, whatever else we have to fear, we simply do not live in a police state. Words and terms like these matter. They should not be abused. We should not cheapen serious language by spraying it around in circumstances to which it does not properly apply.
I agree entirely with what Martin Kettle wrote yesterday at Comment is Free about Leila Deen's custarding of Peter Mandelson. I reckon the custarding itself is pretty silly - I think Mandelson himself is right that not too much should be made of it - but I think it's fair enough that Leila Deen and Plane Stupid are free to protest in this way as long as they accept that others who oppose that kind of behaviour are free to "protestprotest" by custarding them.
More interesting is his point about a police state. Since 9/11, what you could call civil libertiesism has become hugely fashionable in Britain. Noticing real social and political phenomena such as the increasing numbers of cameras on streets and roads as well as in buildings, the huge amount of data now collected on us, largely automatically and for commercial purposes as well as public ones, increased reliance on DNA evidence by the courts, the proliferation of police powers and offences and the creation of unprecented methods of control and semi-detention for terrorist suspects, some people's concern has snowballed into quite a movement ranging across the political spectrum and arguing that liberty is seriously under threat in the UK. The Convention on Modern Liberty is the latest incarnation of this zeitgeisty movement. Now, I'm interested in all this as much as anyone, the Convention is a large discussion in which I imagine not everyone has already decided the state is using a terror scare to attack freedom, and I agree that vigilance is fine, fun and essential. But I can't help being contrarian about it. I'm highly sceptical of the conventional liberal wisdom this Convention embodies.
In truth, Britain is not only as far as you can get from a police state in the modern world; it's the furthest any society has ever been from dictatorship or tyranny, and I think anyone who can seriously disagree mustn't get what what freedom really is. It's easy to be abstract about this kind of thing, peddle factoids about the number of times we're supposedly caught on cameras and mix a whole load of different developments into one big one. But there isn't one big thing, and being a bit concerned about some things that are happening - I'm against ID cards for instance, and opposed 42-day detention for terror suspects - doesn't mean you have to see the use of CCTV cameras as part of a huge sinister plot. I am not especially worried by CCTV cameras, which I think probably do something - not much - to keep down the amount of violence that happens in British cities, and am no more afraid of being "watched" by them than I am of being "watched" by pedestrians in the street. What do the civil libertarians think the police voyeurs want to see, anyway? Do they want to check what shirt I have on or whether I'm picking my nose? Nor am I worried about the use of DNA: in fact, I'm saddened by the fact that the European Court of Human Rights has placed an obstacle in the way of the further development of the UK's DNA database, and I think real freedom will suffer as a result. People will disagree with me: fine. We have different views. What really does trouble me, though, is if somehow the idea starts to spread around that societies like the one I live in are not free.
I, like the great constitutional lawyer Dicey think freedom is as much about being able to listen to a band or eat a bun as it is to hear a speech. It's about practical living. Look away for a moment from abstractions - the statistics, the analyses of new laws - focus on the real texture of life and you'll see that people around you (at least if you live in London like me) read what they like - in spite of the efforts of religious fundamentalists - listen to the music they like, watch and make films freely, choose what job they want to pursue, have a smorgasbord of sexualities to choose from, dress as they wish no matter how tastelessly (something that's very noticeable about England) and eat and drink what they will. They say what they like, too, and can easily throw custard in a cabinet minister's face. This is not a police state, and anyone who thinks it is is a fool. A suspect fool in my mind, too, because the wish to subvert truth by calling freedom its opposite seems to me merely a subtle way of undermining it. It's the old trick Marxists used to specialise in. And the ultimate test of whether you're in a police state is whether you can say so. Police states tend to really not like you calling them that; free countries tend not to mind your accusing them. It's an accusation that's never true, at least if you're in the country you're talking about and not arrested soon afterwards.
I'm fine with guarding the guardians, eternal vigilance and all that. As I've said, I share some of people's worries about aspects of liberty myself. I'll be less happy if as a result of campaigning on this bundle of issues more people begin to develop a distorted view of the society I live in. Perhaps we need to guard the guardian-guards, too.
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