Taking Liberties

Labour has taken 13 years of diabolical liberties with Britain

Individualism and autonomy used to be prized – now they are held in contempt, argues Simon Heffer

That is the headline to this article.

An extract;

A danger of the Government's having made such a mess of the economy is that one risks forgetting all the other horrors for which it is responsible. Between now and the election I shall make a point of discussing some of these other factors that an intelligent voter should want to consider before casting his or her ballot. Despite stiff competition from matters like Europe, immigration, law and order and the near-destruction of our education system, one is perhaps worse than all the others: the insidious and at times quite terrifying assault on our civil liberties.

Gordon Brown tells us not to look at the past, but to look to the future. I wonder why that is?

Labour have taken this country to the cleaners.

In my opinion Labour are those criminals who knock on an elderly persons door and say they have seen some damage on their house and will repair it for £100.

Then, they say they found some more damage and bill the owner £1500+.

That is just what they have done to the finances of this country.

I'll let Simon Heffer tell you about the liberties we have lost

The Government has created 4,300 new offences since it came to office. Many of these are either absurd (such as making it a crime to use a nuclear weapon) or they duplicate laws on the statute book. Some would say this highlights the ignorance of those who govern us. Maybe it does; but I would argue, too, that it shows their insatiable hunger for control.

In the long years of Tory rule, those who reminded the electorate that with a Labour government you also got socialist control were dismissed as scaremongers. However, it is true, and we now see it is true. We live in a country where harmless people taking pictures of cathedrals are warned off by police invoking anti-terrorism laws; where the same legislation is used to regulate the positioning of wheelie bins; where smoking is banned even in public places whose owners wish to allow it; where the hunting of vermin is banned even on the land of those who wish to have it hunted. All these invasions of individual autonomy have taken place since 1997.

It could have been worse. We could have had identity cards, forcing a citizen to prove his or her right to be here, or to admit who he or she is, despite having committed no offence. We could have had a national DNA database. We could have had a law that prevented comedians telling jokes about religion. We could have had the restriction of jury trials. We could have had people locked up without trial for 90 days because the police are incapable of finding any evidence upon which to convict them of something. We could have criminalised people for being nutters, for that is one of the best words to describe those poisonous idiots who claim Auschwitz was just a film set and the genocide of the Jews didn't happen. All these things have been discussed or proposed by Labour in varying degrees of seriousness, but – so far – have not been inflicted on our people. However, they show a certain, and unpleasant, cast of mind.

As it is, enough has been done by the state to remove our autonomy. We are discouraged from having opinions of our own, especially on moral or ethical matters, and certainly from expressing them. It is frowned on to be opposed to abortion; or to believe homosexual partnerships to be lacking in equivalence to marriage; or to imagine that stable family units with both a mother and a father are superior, generally, to those that lack one or the other; or to imagine that married families might last better than unmarried ones; or to have any sort of perceived privilege, whether it be through wealth, hard work, luck or simply having the right outlook on life or the right sort of parents.

In Miss Harman's insane view the state can, indeed – and should – eliminate all these factors, or work to compensate those who do not have them. This can only be done at the cost of autonomy: at the cost of people being allowed to decide what in their lives is valuable, and living their lives in accordance with those decisions. We are more regulated, more policed, more restricted than in living memory, except in war.

This is the natural consequence of having politicians infected with a doctrine that office is about the power to prevent rather than about the power to enable. They are also politicians who restrict the many, without a thought for their liberty, in order to try to control the behaviour of a few. Individualism and autonomy used to be prized rights of our people. Now they are held in contempt by our governors. If we seek reasons not to give Labour another term in office, this wanton theft of our liberties should be high among them.

Labour has ruined this country, but the country isn't lost.

We need to show Labour that we no longer believe them or believe in them.

Labour need to be sent back to the stone age in the election.