Bagehot The Price Of Freedom

摘要

Amob of Britain's finest eccentrics will gather in central Lon-don on February 28th. Their ranks will include outspoken novelists, radical lawyers and fed-up judges. David Davis, an unusual mp who left the shadow cabinet to wage guerrilla war from the backbenches, will be there; so will Shami Chakrabarti, the relentless head of Liberty, a pressure group. Several of those attending can sometimes seem pious; but in a stubborn, deeply English way, many are rather magnificent. The occasion is the "convention on modern liberty", an event designed to rally opposition to the ongoing erosion of rights and freedoms in Britain (there will be similar meetings in other cities).rnIt might not seem the best moment for the ragtag gang to make its stand. The hour of the leviathan is nigh: the financial crisis has given the state permission to meddle in places that would once have seemed indecent. Economic "fairness" has eclipsed most talk of the judicial kind. Even in the fat times, often it was only the eccentrics who seemed to care about habeas corpus, due process or the use of anti-terrorist laws to quell hecklers at the Labour Party conference. Surely the slump is not the time to reclaim liberties that were casually cancelled during the boom?