Those opposing Covid plan B claim liberty as motive. But authoritarian impulses are never far away
. As did 290 other Tory MPs. A further 66 abstained or did not vote. Again, not a single Tory opposed the bill.
Tory libertarians are not libertarian in any meaningful sense. They accept, indeed welcome, the most grotesque denial by the state of individual liberty so long as it is directed against people they deem unworthy of such freedoms, whether protesters or immigrants.columnist Fraser Nelson, have bemoaned “the rise of illiberal conservatism”. Such illiberalism is, however, neither new nor strange.
Nelson cites the 19th-century liberal Walter Bagehot as an exemplar of the kind of liberal conservatism he would like to re-establish. In 1852, writing from Paris, Bagehot welcomed Louis Napoleon’s bloody coup d’etat the previous year to suppress the 1848 revolution. “The first duty of society,”, “is the preservation of society: to keep up this system we must sacrifice everything. Parliaments, liberty, leading articles, essays, eloquence – all are good, but they are secondary.
Liberty has always been a contested issue, both in its meaning and in its scope. Those in power have constantly attempted to exclude certain groups from benefiting from the largesse of liberty. “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” asked Samuel Johnson of the American revolutionaries of 1776.
It was historically the left that waved the banner of liberty, seeking to expand its meaning and to include debarred groups, from the working class to women to colonial subjects. These struggles gave shape to the modern meaning of liberty. More recently, though, many sections of the left have retreated from issues that once helped define it, from free speech to civil liberties.
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