8th June 2011
The Freedom Bill – Truncated
Mark Hanson
In 2009 the Liberal Democrats published what they trumpeted as the milestone in the civil liberty movement: the Freedom Bill.
Published as both a proposal and an impetus to public debate, the Freedom Bill would, if implemented by a government, have rolled back decades of corrosive erosion of what many regard as the freedoms that make the UK what it is.
In 2010, the Liberal Democrats entered into coalition government with the Conservative party, and there was, somewhat surprisingly, an opportunity for this proposal to become law. The subsequent Queen’s Speech did, indeed, make known the intention to publish a Freedom (Great Repeal) Bill. The Queen said:
“Legislation will be brought forward to restore freedoms and civil liberties through the abolition of identity cards and repeal of unnecessary laws.”
The initial result was the abolition of the Identity Card scheme, and a further step is taking place as the Protection of Freedoms Bill 2011 makes progress through Parliament. Yet the Bill as it stands is a far cry from a Great Repeal: it is the Great Tinkering; the Great Disappointment; the Great Missed Opportunity Bill.
To be fair, there are a great many good provisions in this Bill. The regulation of CCTV systems, whereby we walk through an Orwellian maze every time we enter a town centre, is welcome. The provisions curtailing the surveillance powers of local authorities: again, welcome. And perhaps the greatest return of freedoms contained in this Bill is the reduction of pre-charge detention times to 14 days rather than 28 and the reining in of the out-of-control stop and search powers held by the police.
Yet the striking thing is not what this Bill contains, but what it doesn’t. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 remains untouched, and its provisions that curtail freedom of assembly, movement and the right to protest will remain in force. The Public Order Act 1986 also gets through, with the grotesque offence of making “insulting” language a criminal offence: a law that has seen Christian preachers arrested for teaching Biblical standards on sexual conduct. There is, in fact, no reference to free speech at all in the new Bill as it currently stands, leaving the ridiculous laws of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 and other serious curtailments on what we say (and in Scotland, even express in the privacy of our own homes) left on and rotting the Statute book and the basic premise of British law.
The Liberal Democrats claim a victory. The Conservatives have their laws of the Thatcher and Major eras left unscathed. The Coalition may be happy. But the maid of liberty lays languishing in her chains.
