Liberty Central? Don't make me laugh!

Late with the news as usual, I'm sure you all already know that the Guardian Comment is Free lot have launched a section it calls "Liberty Central" to fight for "civil liberties". On the face of it a good idea and some good names are involved - Henry Porter's blog will be based there and the Liberty pressure group led by my university Chancellor Shami Chakrabati and of which I am a supporter will be hosting a civil liberties clinic.

So far so good; we have witnessed (or perhaps too many of us have not actually witnessed, which is why they get away with it) a steady erosion of our civil liberties (not merely over the past decade of Labour government of course, but increasingly frantic over that period). And, within reason, any high profile campaign to raise awareness of these attacks on our freedoms is welcome.

But...and you knew there had to be one...there have been a couple of articles that have to me gone out of their way to spoil the unanimity of the body of diverse people for whom civil liberties matter very much. There is actually quite a lot in Tony Benn's introductory article with which I agree - and perhaps most especially his own disagreement with the idea in one of the comments he read that "Tory principles (are) of liberty and small government". But having entitled his contribution "Liberty is not an issue of left or right..." he concludes with a big side swipe at what he calls "rightwing libertarians who want liberty and have a different approach to economic and social policy".

Conor Gearty, however, goes into more detail in yesterday's (Mon. 2nd February) set piece:

We enjoy the civilised society we have today largely because of the courageous actions of past generations of democratic activists, people determined enough to wrest political power from the few and deploy it for the benefit of the many. Such early democrats knew the value of government and well appreciated how the most resistant to regulation were those whose wealth and privilege were likely to be reined in by proper democratic government. To camouflage their self-interest in morality, these forces of conservatism described themselves as libertarian, in other words as committed to freedom and on that account opposed to governmental intrusion into their lives. These are the "right wing libertarians" whom Benn rightly excoriates at the end of his essay: the only interest they have is in their own freedom to continue to act selfishly at the expense of others. [From Conor Gearty: Is there a risk that in pursuing its liberty agenda, the left is drifting into a dangerous brand of libertarianism? | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk]

...and it is with this I wish particularly to take issue. It misrepresents, grossly, the origins of libertarianism. Chronologically and ideologically. It conveniently ignores generations of libertarian and anarchist activists that marched side by side with the radical nineteenth century fighters for democracy against the vested interests and privilege of the old order, controlled by the monopolies of land and money and protected by the greatest monopoly of them all, the state.

Libertarianism in this long historical tradition is in stark opposition to conservatism. Even those soi-dissant libertarians who have, for whatever reason, made political cause with the Conservative party in this country are rarely the champions of vested interest and privilege this passage would have us believe. Those who call themselves "anarcho-capitalists" for example follow the tradition of the individualist anarchists in demanding the break up of government boondoggling deals with big corporations that has created such a culture of corporate welfare that they see fundamentally disadvantages the poorest and weakest.

Personally I just don't believe in the concept of what Gearty and Benn call "right wing libertarians". There may be right wingers who call themselves libertarian as a flag of convenience, but their influence is limited and to write as if they make up any significant portion of the broad church that has been libertarianism over the past century and a half is to attempt deliberately to drive a wedge between those of us who do share your common cause of civil liberties most passionately, albeit as but one strand of liberty amongst many you choose to reject.

As to the underlying assumption in both Benn and Gearty's pieces that "democracy" is the end and liberty but a characteristic albeit important by-product of that, need they be reminded that we are fighting this fight against a democratically elected government, one which many of those supporting "Liberty Central" will have helped put into power. Or, as libertarian blogger Old Holborn pointed out only yesterday, some of the most egregious examples of regimes that have taken the eradication of rights and liberties to their ultimate extremes have been either democratically elected or put in power by the mob, demos.

The fact is that the collectivist left is only half a friend of liberty, if that. They have an authoritarian streak a mile wide running through them. One that says that it's okay for them to decide to take arbitrary amounts of property from one to give to another, to decide for people what's best for them, and in doing so set up expensive structures that have proven to put the poorest and weakest into a state of dependency that at times is the modern incarnation of slavery. Only this time, it's to the state, the great monopoly from which nobody can break free, in their world at least.

If "Liberty Central" cannot do better than this, it does not deserve the name, for it barely begins to understand the concept.