"Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it." Woodrow Wilson

Some years ago I harangued a meeting on the threat to liberty, and found myself sharing a platform with John Wadham, then the director of Liberty (formerly the National Council for Civil Liberties). I teased him by saying that he...

Campaign group Liberty seems more interested in proposing an alternative authoritarianism than defending freedom.

This. The solution of course, as we so often say, is better people. But to be able to get some, we have to have some liberty. Posted in Liberty Tagged: expenses, Liberty, morality, MPs, rules, scumbags, socialism, troughing

Modern Liberty. I hear it and my skin crawls. What is modern liberty? How is modern liberty different from plain, boring old liberty? See, thanks to this shower of lemons we’ve currently got running the country, the word ‘modern’ has never been more foreboding. If anyone’s been keen on ‘modernising’ the state’s attitudes towards civil liberties, it’s

When I was an undergraduate doing philosophy modules it was very clear what political liberty was and wasn’t. You had ‘negative liberty’ which meant that the state doesn’t have the right to imprison you without trial, shoot you, torture you, censor you, or do other dictatorial things. Then there was ‘positive liberty’ - the right to

Liberty is liberty, not equality or human happiness or a quiet conscience. [Isaiah Berlin, 1958] In the lip service paid in this era by governments and the powers behind them to the concepts of fairness and justice through their ‘positive discrimination’ and ‘egalitarian society’, the central aim all along has been the curtailment of liberty. To return to the original plan ...

Carnival on Modern Liberty. Part the Third. | Liberal Democrat Voice.The Convention on Modern Liberty is bringing some, erm, interesting people together. I confess I am going more in curiosity than hope. Still the Carnival on Modern Liberty blogging collections...

"This coup took place to protect your liberty. Some of you may find this strange, as you currently have less liberty, owing to my regime being a vicious theocratic hell. Well, to use a phrase of a friend of mine, try thinking outside the box. It is well known that to have a large degree of liberty, it is necessary to surrender a small amount to allow for police, security services and the like. We....

Why? :: Modern Liberty.Across Britain, on 28th February 2009, a convention organised by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, openDemocracy, No2ID, Liberty and (implausibly, I know) the Guardian, will bring as many people together to see what common ground can be reached...