The Price Of Freedom
Three items on the mornings radio news. A senior policeman is advocating a compulsory national DNA database. A new camera is being tested which can identify how many occupants are travelling in a car, this to assist in the policing of car sharing lanes. The Law Society wants to see a new legal framework for the bugging of telephone conversations. Other stories percolating just under headline level, the admission that the Americans had used British bases during the kidnap of foreign nationals, the government is still struggling to push through legislation extending the length of time persons can be held without charge. The list could be longer.
A former government advisor described the creation of a national DNA database as inevitable, that is ‘unable to be avoided, evaded, or escaped; certain; necessary.’ I thought that it is this very notion of an unstoppable juggernaut that has characterised the more general response to the erosion of civil liberties.
Of course such developments are anything but inevitable, however what this drip drip erosion of our basic rights does is create a climate of inevitability, coupled with the ‘common sense’ view that ‘why would anyone with nothing to hide possibly object to such developments.’
Let me say that I strongly suspect that such a development as a DNA database would increase both the number of successful convictions. I can also envisage that a range of draconian limitations on our liberties would greatly reduce the risk of terrorist attack. For example it is difficult to envisage active terrorist cells operating effectively in Stalin’s Russia. So long as societies remain free and open they remain an easier target for terrorist fanatics. However that is the nub of the issue, 3,508 people were killed on Britain’s roads in 2003, and yet we are not in the middle of the war on the motor vehicle. Though it is rarely, if ever said, this death toll is thought to be a price worth paying to enable us the dubious pleasure of travel by motor vehicle. Well we can debate this, however it does recognise that every freedom carries a price tag, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
I opposed the war with Iraq; I was one among the million or so who marched. However even then I was made uncomfortable by some of the arguments made against the war, not least that we should not attack a Muslim country since this would leave us open to revenge attacks, bombs going off in London. I thought then, as I think even more so now, that this was a cowardly and basically very stupid argument. Taken to its logical extreme it would mean that we would never have declared war on Nazi Germany.
The bill must be paid, there is no opt out clause. If you believe, as I do, in a free and tolerant society, one however that holds freedom of discourse as the highest good, then get real, don’t allow the intolerant thugs to dictate law, do not surrender before their ignorance and their malice and take the consequences. Otherwise the game is up.
A former government advisor described the creation of a national DNA database as inevitable, that is ‘unable to be avoided, evaded, or escaped; certain; necessary.’ I thought that it is this very notion of an unstoppable juggernaut that has characterised the more general response to the erosion of civil liberties.
Of course such developments are anything but inevitable, however what this drip drip erosion of our basic rights does is create a climate of inevitability, coupled with the ‘common sense’ view that ‘why would anyone with nothing to hide possibly object to such developments.’
Let me say that I strongly suspect that such a development as a DNA database would increase both the number of successful convictions. I can also envisage that a range of draconian limitations on our liberties would greatly reduce the risk of terrorist attack. For example it is difficult to envisage active terrorist cells operating effectively in Stalin’s Russia. So long as societies remain free and open they remain an easier target for terrorist fanatics. However that is the nub of the issue, 3,508 people were killed on Britain’s roads in 2003, and yet we are not in the middle of the war on the motor vehicle. Though it is rarely, if ever said, this death toll is thought to be a price worth paying to enable us the dubious pleasure of travel by motor vehicle. Well we can debate this, however it does recognise that every freedom carries a price tag, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
I opposed the war with Iraq; I was one among the million or so who marched. However even then I was made uncomfortable by some of the arguments made against the war, not least that we should not attack a Muslim country since this would leave us open to revenge attacks, bombs going off in London. I thought then, as I think even more so now, that this was a cowardly and basically very stupid argument. Taken to its logical extreme it would mean that we would never have declared war on Nazi Germany.
The bill must be paid, there is no opt out clause. If you believe, as I do, in a free and tolerant society, one however that holds freedom of discourse as the highest good, then get real, don’t allow the intolerant thugs to dictate law, do not surrender before their ignorance and their malice and take the consequences. Otherwise the game is up.
