Liberty’s price? is the always-disputed value reflected in the rise and fall of individual freedoms in Britain. More narrowly focused today than in the time of civil wars, military and ideological, of the times since Magna Carta and then to today’s intrusive age of “dataveillance”, statutory bans on “religious hatred” and catch-all anti-terror laws.

The liberal phase in our history seems to be coming to an end killed off by our need for security. Stifled by ideological flashpoints, political theories, lively trials and it is Liberty’s demise that shows the national grip on liberty has slipped. Liberty and freedom was never granted from above by benevolent rulers, and never riveted in place by codes and constitutions, our liberties grew piecemeal in “moments of storm and passion”, via boat-rocking minority campaigns often pursued by “seedy adventurers” in the teeth of all respectable opinion. They triumphed occasionally by accident, bluster and blunder.

Censorship in the form of simple daily licensing of books and newspapers only lapsed in 1695 solely due to a “legislative fumble”. The libertine radical John Wilkes fought and risked his life to the event that he managed the case of Entick vs Carrington in 1763 to prove that ministers could be subject to the common law when their enforcers raided the homes of dissidents. Something we need to remember and reapply today.

Lady Liberty has come from unusual quarters to all of us. It often arrived as a bastard child of calculated provocation and opportunism, as well as from  large mobs of people who have scared the government silly enough to allow freedom to ring. Often having no other choice to save their necks. Literally. And small mobs, too often rolled out the guilottinesand made the governments to play ball with freedom…

Remember the ID debate raging till New labour lost it’s head with Gordon Brown and Jack Straw and Hazel Blearsrunning around like chicken with their heads cut off in a voodoo dance? Originally they were introduced during wartime, the identity cards went up in smoke in 1951 when the British Housewives’ League burned theirs outside Parliament.  The cards soon died, in 1952. Time and again, “the direct action of bloody-minded individuals” has widened liberty for all.

The Whig interpretation of history, into which British freedoms are forever rising, step by step towards an ever-more glorious future  is a rather false analysis.

 The quarrels and setbacks, the bloodied landscape of liberty, was far rockier than the sturdy utopia of 19th-century liberal myth.

The British, love the idea of liberty but turn a blind eye to its erosion. From Cromwell’s Protectorate in the 1650s, the counter-revolutionary repressions after 1793 and the protest-strangling Six Acts of 1819, through to the quasi-dictatorial Defence of the Realm and Emergency Powers Acts of two world wars and the wave of anti-terror measures that started to break (prior to 11 September) in 2000, the state has picked up “nasty habits of authoritarianism” at regular intervals. Most citizens,  have connived in their own shackling for the sake of security, especially after the iron age of 20th-century total war when “respect for liberty and belief in democracy” wore thin. Britons sometimes will be slaves – if a Pitt, a Lloyd George or a Blair can frighten them enough.

Isaiah Berlin’s “negative liberty”, the freedom from official interference in behaviour, belief and expression, cannot also be positive at the same time. A definitive history of the struggle for democratic and collective rights is the Liberty’s walk onwards and too often backwards. Chartists and Suffragists, anti-slavery Abolitionists and trade-union activists are all minor players. A figure pivotal to the joint pursuits of civil liberty and social justice as well as human Rights is Tomas Paine, who died 200 years ago this week. he fought for Liberty and it’s pursuit both here and in America as well as France.

We can hear all the tempests outside our secure lodgings in a safe adobe made so by Neo-labour’s machinations. Liberty’s battering, whether provoked by a minority rights culture of  of victims and victors or by PC – political correctness claimants, or by the hi-tech hand of the surveillance state, is irrelevant so long as Liberty is drown. Drown in the cesspit of eloquent voices (see Blair) who affirm that  great gay tragedy of modern times that the idea of liberty is contrary to our drunk yet secure nature. Same view espoused by the Cof E cardinals of old.  Has Liberty’s swelling breast disappeared from our culture completely?

 It has fractured, of course; but disappeared? Time spent with John Stuart Mill – a towering presence here – is never wasted. Yet even Mill (in The Subjection of Women) had by the late 1860s begun to probe the flaws in the classical paradigm of British liberty.

Sure enough, Liberty has dissapearedfrom thought, but with attractive nostalgia for the awkward squad of free-born Englishmen, mocking the magistrate and pelting the constable before diving into a tavern to get liberally plastered on free-brewed English ale.

The Lord Mayor of London in 1770 changed the transparency of government by arresting a Sergeant-at-Arms, who was sent to detain a City printer. Thus  he helped establish the open reporting of parliamentary debates. Closer to the present day, multi-cultural dilemmas, Danish cartoons and such freedom-draining measures as the Racial and Religious Hatred Act have a New Labour’s managerial regime stamp on freedom. Blair and Brown ministers ridicule liberty constantly.

The science and strategy behind the surveillance state is brilliant, with a chilling risk-assessment technology that can silently monitor every corner of our lives like some stealth fighter that combines intensive firepower with zero radio profile.

 The official mantra that the innocent have nothing to fear from this hi-tech supervision, rings hollow when you are arrested or surveilled or constantly observed and especially when you start altering your behaviour because of this. I believe that we should fear the loss of privacy which is at the heart of liberty.

Private freedom rests in the last resort on a flourishing “civil society” that today’s anxious, distrustful populace by and large neglects. Assuming that freedoms bring shared as well as individual benefits we need to care equally for individual as well as  collective rights. A golden rule balance is what we need.

Something all governments tend to forget in the face of efficiency.

Look where efficiency got the Nazis in Germany and be steered clear away from it…