Political

Freedom Bill launched by Chris Huhne and the Liberal Democrats

Chris Huhne and colleagues have just finished a press conference in Cowley Street, launching the party’s draft Freedom Bill. As he writes for Comment is Free:

There has always been a problem for civil libertarians. The sacrifices of freedoms made by successive governments often seem small, particularly when they are pushed through at times of panic about terrorism. Each time, the government argues that you only need to give up a modest amount of freedom or rights to win greater security. And what could be more free than life itself? Yet the cumulative effects of this salami-slicing have now become deeply corrosive to the free spirit of a civil society. Like some sci-fi horror movie, we are slowly becoming the authoritarian threat that we are fighting.

The Liberal Democrats are determined to resist the slow death by a thousand cuts of our hard-won British liberties. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was a warning, not a blueprint. Yet the Big Brother society that he satirised is growing before our eyes. Our forebears who fought so hard for the rights we have had stripped away would be shocked at what we’ve lost.

That is why we have published our freedom bill, detailing how we intend to roll back the draconian laws passed by successive Labour and Conservative administrations.

You can read his full piece here, and you can back the campaign and find out more about the bill at freedom.libdems.org.uk.

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