New year, new threats

Friday January 6, 2012

Tom Miers warns that 2012 will see renewed assaults on personal liberty

David Cameron is an amiable Prime Minister with healthy liberal instincts. His signature political theme – the Big Society – emphasises voluntary activity to solve problems of social welfare. As he put it so succinctly, “there is such as thing as society. It’s just not the same thing as the state.”

The government’s central mission is to reform public services by deregulating them. Cameron believes that the best way to attack poverty is by replacing state compulsion with voluntary and private sector initiative. On this agenda the coalition has already made significant progress. In education, for example, Cameron’s policies on schools and universities promise a dramatic improvement in performance on the back of much greater institutional freedom.

So it seems extraordinary that under such a liberal-minded government we should face a confluence of threats to individual liberty in 2012. In the areas of lifestyle freedom that the Free Society takes a particular interest in, the danger is particularly pronounced.

Over Christmas we learnt that David Cameron is considering imposing ‘minimum pricing’ on the drinks industry. A few days later he ‘summoned’ music industry leaders to complain about the content of their videos. The Prime Minister is well known to fret about other people’s diets, bullying food companies to do this or that to make their product less appealing.

This agitation takes pace in the global context of a remorseless drive by lobbyists to restrict the consumption of any product, or the pursuit of any lifestyle choice, that has a potential impact on health, real or imagined.

The campaign to prohibit tobacco continues its merciless progress. The latest initiative, alongside ever higher duties and more extensive location bans, is to force tobacco companies to sell their wares in ‘plain packaging’. The move is in keeping with the sinister language of the prohibitionists. Smoking is to be ‘de-normalised’, with smokers themselves targeted for abuse by making their habit seem covert, anti-social and repulsive.

‘Plain packaging’ has already been instituted in Australia, and there are signs that the UK government is succumbing to the pressure of the anti-smoking campaign.

An explicit ‘fat tax’ is being mooted in Denmark, and it is perhaps on food consumption that we should expect the greatest extension of the war on personal liberty.

In areas such as free speech, censorship, surveillance and the formal relationship between the individual and the state, at least there is now widespread debate on the threat to freedom. But here too the institutional and cultural bias favours increasing regulation. ID cards were scrapped as much on the grounds of cost as on principle.

The truth is that we are gripped by a worrying trend towards ever greater intervention in how we run our lives. All these issues go together. It is no accident that the ban on smoking in public places has been followed by attacks on drinking, eating and other pleasurable pursuits. Once a precedent has been set that the state should determine lifestyle choices, it is easy for government to extend its brief.

Why do politicians insist on meddling so? It is almost as if there is something in the DNA of modern democratic government that impels it towards intervention. Consider the situation now. We have a government engaged in an exhausting and uncertain campaign to control its budget. It is also undertaking controversial reforms of welfare, healthcare and education. All of these are long term policies that will take years to come to fruition.

And yet every day government must fight a tactical battle to dominate the endless news cycle. Just this morning I heard the Prime Minister on radio telling the nation how he was going simultaneously to make nurses patrol their wards more regularly and convene a conference on whether SatNavs work well or not.

The need to portray a daily sense of dynamism is just one of the forces that drive politicians to intervention. At a deeper level there is a powerful dynamic that encourages democratic governments to undermine liberty in the pursuit of power, a process described in my recent book Democracy and the Fall of the West.

Short of a constitutional revolution, what can be done to slow and reverse these trends? The answer must be to engage in the political/media game and emerge as winners. With each piece of intervention, politicians perform a calculation: will the initiative accrue more political capital in terms of being seen to address society’s problems than it will cost in terms of annoying voters?

Our task is to help reverse that calculation in the interests of liberty. Imposing, say, a fat tax on hamburgers has to be rendered too much bother for government. The headlines have to be negative, the arguments lost, the contradictions exposed, the costs calculated. Lifestyle regulation is rarely at the centre of a government’s programme. It is incidental, tactical, and marginal. Turn that political calculation on its head often enough and a real difference can be made in the long battle for freedom.

The Free Society cannot win this war on its own. But as a repository for good ideas and a platform for well articulated polemic this site can act as a source of inspiration for the wider political and media conflict.

Tom Miers is Editor of The Free Society. Democracy and the Fall of the West, co-written with Craig Smith, is available from Amazon and Imprint Academic