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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
March 17, 2002
A free country
My title this week is not original so I have set it in quotes. Apart from anywhere else the phrase has been it was used by Charles Moore editor of the Daily Telegraph in England last summer to kick off a wonderful series of little reports and exposes. It was a campaign for freedom for "a free country" or at least for freedom in one country. The premise was that freedom is a good thing and that the burden in any argument to restrict it must be upon those who would restrict. The burden should not be on the people who are enjoying the freedom to defend their inherited rights. The campaign was meant to appeal across party political lines to left right and centre. The left likes to restrict some things -- the freedom to hunt foxes for instance. The right likes to restrict others -- let's say the freedom to take drugs. The lists are now very long on both sides but the point would be to organize some trade-offs. In the example You let us hunt foxes and we'll let you abuse drugs. Freedom is not the only thing -- security counts for something as we've been reminded recently and there are any number of other good things that might in special circumstances trump freedom. We are not libertarian ideologues. But we do believe the great majority of humans are capable of running their own lives. "Thus as Mr. Moore told an interviewer from the competing Guardian, why shouldn't people be free to hunt or smoke cannabis or build an extension to their house or travel without an identity card or read pornography on the internet or adopt children? There may be reasons to prevent any or all of these things but the restrictors should be the ones who have to make their case." Do you remember last summer incidentally? I am trying but having trouble -- consider my line of work -- remembering just what it was like in that era when the World Trade Centre was still standing and we were outwardly at peace. Rightly and wrongly -- some of the one some of the other -- our governments have acted to restrict our freedoms in many mostly petty and pointless ways since September. But we must remember that as a matter of course they were making it their business to restrict our freedoms in so many mostly petty and pointless ways through years in which they did not have such an easy excuse. At the time Mr. Moore was launching his campaign the Labour government in Westminster was tabling legislation to prevent people having messy gardens. Not the City of Westminster; the Parliament at Westminster. That was extremely petty but at the other end of the scale the same government was (is still) trying to restrict the right to trial by jury. A right which in England to quote the advocate's mantra has somehow survived Civil War, Restoration, Industrial Revolution, two World Wars, and one World Cup . George Orwell that 1930s leftie pointed out that people who mangle the language will go on to mangle their fellow human beings. And when a government means to invade our privacy it starts by claiming to defend it. Our Canadian Richard J. Needham explained that the advocates of petty measures start by accusing their opponents of pettiness in trying to resist. But those were the good old days you must listen some time to our present debates in Parliament to know how the tone has changed over the years. Our politicians today mock freedom openly in the rare moments when they are put on the spot. Any argument for freedom will be dismissed smugly with the suggestion that the speaker is simple-minded. It is the great post-modern tautology at work: "The world is complicated and that is why we must work so hard to make it more complicated." It was odd that a Telegraph editor would sign off on an editorial with the words "Libertad o muerte!" Mr. Moore is a graduate of Eton and Trinity the former editor of the Tory intellectual weekly the Spectator and himself a fox-hunting man. He was an adviser to Margaret Thatcher when she was prime minister yet notwithstanding has a reputation as a gentleman of the old school -- not only table manners but politeness of speech and as I gather at second-hand a real and clubable gift for friendship. Though I stand to be corrected he has probably never thrown a Molotov cocktail. He is worldly in the better sense he understands and resists the corruption of power. As he said of the prime minister he served in addition to economic freedoms Mrs. Thatcher believed in the other kinds too. "But she didn't get round to them. If you've been in office for a long time you always start to believe in having more power and she undoubtedly got that disease." He understands how the campaign against freedom is conducted how the control freaks make their advances. There is a natural complicity between the right-wing instinct of the tabloids there's a nasty person so let's go and punch him -- and the left-wing instinct to social engineering. The individual is squeezed from both sides. It would therefore take a conspiracy of both right and left to turn the tables. Alas today it would almost certainly take a right-wing party to even try. In the British Columbia legislature this last week Bill Bennett member for East Kootenay proposed the provincial government declare hunting and fishing to be "heritage activities". This was his roundabout way to prepare against campaigns to ban them entirely. What an extraordinary confession that the elementary freedoms of rural people can only be justified by dressing them up as something else -- as "heritage activities". I support Stephen Harper now running for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance because if he won he would become the only party leader in Ottawa who might get this point. Moreover the only one bright enough to understand it. To understand that freedom is not an ideological position. That it is rather the default position from which we depart and to which we should return if there is any dignity in us as a people. That the struggle to restore freedoms by eliminating the pettiest laws and regulations should be a basic heritage activity. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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