How Free are We, Really?

by Lynda Goetz

In a year which has seen clampdowns on online posts in the UK following the Southport riots and endless examples of police overreach on ‘hate incidents’, and in a week in which hundreds have been arrested for demonstrating in support of Palestine Action, recently proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the government, questions of how free we are, or indeed should be, under a democratic system spring to mind.

Democracy should ideally depend on a diversity of opinions and the free exchange of ideas. It has felt to many of us over the last several years that the freedoms, particularly perhaps freedom of speech, on which the UK prided itself, have increasingly been eroded and called into question. The rights of government to shut down opposition seemed certainly to be strengthened during the Covid lockdown years.  The views of those who disagreed with the serious restrictions on people’s rights to meet up freely, to move around the country, and even to visit family and friends were monitored by a special government unit (The Counter-Disinformation Unit, CDU*). People who breached these rules could be subject to criminal charges. Those scientists who held different views from those espoused by the government were ignored, drowned out or ridiculed. Dr Sunetra Gupta, Carl Heneghan and Karol Sikora were all eminent scientists whose views were discounted. The Conservative government of the time claimed to be “following the science”, but they were selective about which science they chose to follow.

At the same time as we were living under restrictions which not only may not have been necessary, but which have resulted in subsequent damage to the economy and, in this country in particular, an increasingly workshy population, many of whom are electing to live on benefits, we were also being subjected more and more to a culture which demanded that no-one should be offended or upset – not even by events which happened in the past. Thus, we were all expected to agree that a trans woman was indeed a woman; that we all needed to assert what our pronouns were, even where to most of us that was obvious; that the religion of others was sacrosanct, even where our own could be ignored or dismissed and that statues of past heroes could be removed if the lives of those they represented did not accord with contemporary values (e.g on slavery).

Since the Supreme Court ruled on April 16^th this year that ‘sex’ and ‘woman’ in the Equality Act 2010 referred exclusively to biological sex assigned at birth, some degree of sanity appears to be returning to at least some of our institutions. However, the NHS, particularly captured by this woke ideology, does still appear to be reluctant in many regions to allow ‘women only’ facilities. Kathleen Stock, who came to address the Roger Scruton Summer School, which I attended at the end of July,  and who notoriously left her position at Sussex University as a result of being hounded out by students and academics for her refusal to bow to the prevailing ‘zeitgeist’ seemed to feel that the days of trans minorities imposing their ideology on the rest of society were coming to an end. Interestingly however, her latest book which will come out in September, addresses another ‘freedom’ which, although a self-confessed ‘libertarian’, she is unconvinced should be allowed to us, particularly in the form currently about to enter the statute books, namely the right to choose the time of our departure from this life. As a supporter of the principle at least that we should be allowed this freedom, I took note of her objections, the main one being that to hand the management of such a  choice over to the State, in the form of the NHS, was not something with which she could feel at all relaxed. Perhaps she does have a point?

If the NHS is as strained as we all know it is, and its ability to deal with those who need treatments already at breaking point, how tempting will it be just for those in charge to rubber stamp all submissions to remove the terminally from the balance sheet? Perhaps this is indeed a freedom which we should not be seeking, particularly if in doing so we give the State yet more control over how we live and how we die. Is this freedom a step too far and one which, as the Church does, we should leave to the Almighty or to ‘fate’ if we don’t believe in God?  Is this in reality a freedom at all or, in handing it over to the State will it be yet another nail in the coffin of the individual freedoms we like to believe we can still exercise?

As Lord Sumption pointed out in yet another lecture at our philosophy summer school, (the overall theme of which incidentally was “Which Freedoms Matter?”), the UK right to free speech is, unlike the same right under the American Constitution, conditional.  That is to say, that unlike under the First Amendment, freedom of speech in this country is subject to any adverse societal impacts, as in for example, if our words are an incitement to others to violence. (It is on this ground that he defends the lengthy imprisonment of Lucy Connolly**) Likewise, our right of protest is not a freedom to interfere with the rights of others, it is merely a right to attempt to persuade others of the ‘rightness’ of our views. On this basis, criminal damage, as for example that caused by Palestine Action at the RAF base, is coercive, not persuasive. Although it does become hard to see how arresting hundreds of peaceful protestors supporting Palestine Action at the weekend can be justified in a democracy, as citizens we may perhaps have to concede that a government has knowledge which for security reasons it cannot share and which make that ban on the organisation completely justifiable. If justifiable, then arresting supporters who by supporting a terrorist organisation are breaking the law is also justifiable, if at the same time as intended and planned by Palestine Action, wholly detrimental and time-wasting to our court system.

Unfortunately, there do seem, under this government, to be an ever-expanding number of restrictions on the freedoms we have come to take for granted. How can it be right to restrict the right of an individual to enter the Civil Service based on the occupation (sufficiently working class) of their parents when they were 14? How can it be right to take into account similar factors (the socio-economic background of a child) when allowing them entry into the educational system, which is apparently the latest idea being mooted under reforms to the Equality Act? What is right about a definition of Islamophobia cooked  up by an all-Muslim (bar one, Dominic Grieves) committee when blasphemy laws in this country have otherwise been repealed? This is effectively a blasphemy law by the back door, whatever the government may claim. Why, are there an ever-growing number of cameras in place all over the country monitoring our every move? Surely that sort of surveillance is associated with authoritarian regimes, not with the democracy in which we live?

The problem with freedoms is that they require responsibilities and choices.  As we move further towards a society where people look to the State for handouts and support and accept the rulings of international organisations which decree that we do not even have a right to choose who can live in our country, how rapidly are even our smallest freedoms being eroded by the might of the State – which apparently we have elected?

*The government has always maintained that this does not monitor individuals and that data is anonymised.

**Although not all will agree that there wasn’t some element of political motivation and exercise of authority in ‘making an example’ in this particular case.