Manifesto Club Thinkpieces put our campaigning in broader perspective, exploring the underlying dynamics behind the state regulation of public spaces and informal life.
This Thinkpiece by Dolan Cummings explores the historical and political background to our defence of everyday freedom.
The idea that ‘Britain is a free country’ is so taken for granted that it’s more likely to elicit a roll of the eyes than a swell of pride. It’s a cliché associated with ‘Whig history’ and Cold War triumphalism. It might even be considered bad manners to imply our way of life is better than any other. And yet, would we rather live in an unfree country? Would anyone?
In much of the world, people live in fear of being arrested without a trial worthy of the name. There is no free press to hold the government and powerful business interests to account. Individuals are not free to live, love, travel and do business as they choose. Nor do they have freedom of association, the right to form political parties or civic organisations. Some people in such countries campaign bravely for the freedoms they lack. A large part of their task is to convince their fellow citizens that such freedoms are not only desirable but achievable, and therefore worth fighting for. Nobody takes freedom for granted, because it is not granted.
In the UK, civil libertarians face a different challenge. Typically, they point to legislation and to trends in policing that threaten to undermine long-established freedoms. But no government openly, or even deliberately, sets out to make the country less free. Politicians and police chiefs insist the measures they champion are compatible with the fundamental freedoms people value. Those freedoms can safely be taken for granted, they suggest, but for no better reason than that they always have been.
Indeed, while new laws and restrictions are presented as means to deal with real problems that people want governments to solve – from terrorism to antisocial behaviour – the language of civil liberties and even (perhaps especially) ‘human rights’ seems disconnected from real life. However exercised human rights lawyers get about such measures, most people don’t see how they will affect their own lives.
The Covid pandemic was different. Lockdown measures directly and dramatically affected everyone. Public buildings and facilities were closed, workplaces were emptied, access to transport was restricted and people were encouraged not even to leave their homes without good reason. Of course, there was a clear rationale for these measures, and we were assured they would be temporary. But while the majority went along with lockdown without complaint, a substantial minority did object and some became ‘radicalised’, regarding lockdown as an indictment of the whole political establishment. Everyone, though, had a taste of what it feels like not to be free.
Since Covid, controversies about civil liberties have largely returned to the political sphere. Street protests about everything from lockdown itself to racism and immigration to the Gaza war and to demonstrations for and against the green agenda have provoked fresh restrictions on free assembly and free speech, online as well as on the streets. Too often, though, our response to such restrictions depends on whether or not we agree with the protests in question. It is easy to object to censorship when it is ‘our side’ being censored, and to see mere criminality to be policed on the other side.
In this context, it is more important than ever to maintain a principled defence of civil liberties and free speech for all, and for the even-handed application of just laws.
The Manifesto Club brings a unique perspective as a ‘civil liberties’ campaign group that has been working for more than a decade on issues that are not overtly political. From the vetting of adults who work with children to bans on drinking alcohol in public places to restrictions on leafleting and busking, our work touches on curbs on freedom that are not usually understood in political terms or viewed through a partisan lens. What we call ‘freedom in everyday life’ is at once more fundamental and more prosaic than ‘human rights’.
Long before Covid or the intensified political polarisation of the past few years, we were documenting the erosion of these everyday liberties. This erosion was not in response to any particular crisis; rather it was the consequence of a gradual diminution of the value placed on freedom. A generation on from the Cold War, and with politics characterised by managerialism rather than high principle, the rhetoric of ‘it’s a free country’ had little more traction than abstract appeals to civil liberties. Then and now, freedom is too often taken to mean the freedom of other people to make a nuisance of themselves.
The consequence has been a picking away at everyday freedom, without much fanfare or even discussion. While campaigners rightly oppose legislation that threatens the right to protest, much less is made of obscure provisions that can see people fined or even imprisoned for such innocuous activities as leafleting, loitering or simply feeding pigeons. Increasingly, the old idea no longer holds that you can do whatever you like unless it genuinely harms others.
In a country that once prided itself on its free and vibrant public sphere, there are now very few places where people can freely set up a stall and canvass their fellow citizens on the local, national or international issues that concern them. Where available at all, this is a privilege to be paid for – and often subject to regulation by private companies – rather than a right to be asserted. And a society that shrugs at curbs on free speech on its streets is unlikely to stand up boldly against restrictions on what can be said on proprietary social media platforms.
Of course, the everyday freedom the Manifesto Club seeks to champion is not timeless. It was shaped by the particular history of Britain and similar countries over the past three or four centuries. Feudalism, with its rigid hierarchies of privilege and obeisance, slowly gave way to an increasingly free and commerce-focused society. Often drawing on the rhetoric of classical republicanism, modern democracy was in fact far more radical, and soon ballooned to accommodate the working class, and then women. The Britain of the postwar period, while in many respects more repressive, was more self-consciously free than the Britain of today.
It might be argued that the inherited freedoms championed by the Manifesto Club are akin to the freedom to drive without a seatbelt (only banned in the UK in 1983) or to smoke on the London Underground (1987, after a deadly fire). Some freedoms are surely worth giving up for the sake of everyone’s safety and comfort. But during the pandemic, we saw how such thinking can be taken to irrational lengths.
With the rhetoric of freedom failing to resonate – and even demonised as antisocial – people accepted unjustifiable school closures, draconian vaccine mandates, relatives being prevented from seeing dying loved ones and the comical imposition of token face coverings in situations where even proper surgical masks could have done no good. We seemed defenceless in the face of a ‘safety first’ culture that brooked no questioning, let alone dissent.
One does not have to reject all state compulsion in all circumstances – especially during a pandemic – to see the value of an instinctive bristling against it. Without that instinct, we are in danger of losing more than particular rights and freedoms. A richer culture of freedom, with a presumption that individuals should be in control of their own lives, has underpinned many of the gains associated with modern Western civilisation.
The expansion of democracy itself was driven by the conviction that people should have a direct say in their own government. The opening up of trade and industry to the free market drove economic growth, creating opportunities for millions; the freedom to associate in trades unions led in turn to improved pay and conditions for workers. Free inquiry in universities and other institutions has added to the sum of human knowledge and accelerated the advance of science and technology. In the arts and culture, too, freedom has unleashed creativity and enriched our lives immeasurably.
All of these benefits are lost or diminished in dictatorial and authoritarian societies. And it is no coincidence that the more intangible virtues of a free civil society – charity, neighbourliness, volunteering – are also less apparent in unfree societies. If they are also at risk in modern Britain, this impoverishment has coincided with the diminution of the value placed on everyday freedom, not an excess of it.
If we want Britain, and other countries, to be genuinely free, and to enjoy the benefits, we must not be coy about championing freedom. And we must insist it is upheld as a core value even when weighed against other priorities. Freedom creates material and intangible benefits, opportunities, success, contentment and happiness. That’s why the Manifesto Club stands up for freedom not only in courts and legislatures, but in everyday life.
- Dolan Cummings is a director of the Manifesto Club. He is also author of three novels and works as a freelance copywriter, speechwriter and editor.