Britain Signs Away Her Democratic Rights

Henry Porter is getting there:

We seem like a progressive, liberal society. The majority of us support gay marriage; we extend greater understanding to people with disabilities, especially those who overcome their disadvantages in competition; we tolerate eye-watering smut about sex and bodily functions from practically every comedian on television. And we have become a much more diverse society, which, while not universally tolerant, allows people to rub along in their day-to-day dealings with remarkably little friction.

Compare life today to three or four decades ago, when the former editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, caused outrage by being only the second person to utter the word fuck on television (after Kenneth Tynan) and offended an entirely different group of people by referring to gay men as "queers", in his 1982 editorial about section 28, the law that forbade local councils from promoting homosexuality.

Tolerance of gender, sexual and racial differences is certainly much greater today. But can Britain be described as a more liberal society after a month that has seen all parties support legislation that will effectively license the press, and a second bill introducing secret hearings in civil cases pass through the Lords, with Liberal Democrat peers whipped to oppose amendments that were designed to support open and natural justice? I'll come to the Lib Dems later, but the short answer is no.

Things are happening that would have been unimaginable to democrats across the political spectrum 30 years ago. Personal rights have expanded and tolerance undeniably has increased, but at the same time we are behaving as though liberty were a limitless resource that can be endlessly compromised without loss to the individual, or to the sum total of rights that define our free society. It's approximately the same kind of negligence as you find in countries blighted by uncontrolled development, where more and more of the natural landscape is sacrificed to progress, until there is no real countryside left, and very little that the people could do to get it back.

During the Labour years, there was a general project, formed by an all-powerful administration, to chivvy, watch and curtail the behaviour of the British people. Today we have a more dangerous political consensus that is selectively undermining important rights, and this will have an impact on the way we are governed in the future.

The press behaved appallingly but also criminally. The Guardian exposed the criminality, while here we did the maths on Rupert Murdoch's deplorable effect on British politics and the political discourse. In other words, a free press that had nothing to fear from fines or a charter that will, whatever anyone says today, be subject to change. It seems not to occur to the royal charter's supporters that the very people who were so easily contaminated by Murdoch's influence – ministers and privy counsellors – will be the ones who could tighten controls if things get rough between the government and some newspapers, just as in two fading democracies – Argentina and Hungary.

On the justice and security bill, I will only say that it is astonishing that it went to the Lords last Tuesday for amendments that would have made a secret hearing closed material procedure a measure of last resort and give greater discretion to judges, only for them to be opposed by Liberal Democrat peers. It is sad, too, that these same individuals talk about bringing the press under control and do not necessarily blanch when you raise the government's plans to collect the information from every email, phone call and internet connection, which are currently being redrafted.

That the Liberal Democrat party lost or betrayed its principles so quickly in government is, I suppose, to be expected, and I have to confess to very little surprise when I read Nick Clegg's weaselly speech on immigration, which seemed to proclaim tolerance yet contained the subsonic message of rightwing dog-whistle politics. With every day that passes, he looks more and more like a member of Blair's second administration home affairs team.

The problem is that as the liberal voice is all but disappearing from parliament we have a generation of leaders in their 40s who will seem almost indistinguishable to future historians. Clegg's betrayal of liberal values was simply part of the process of his becoming a member of the pragmatic, basically non-ideological, homogenised governing class, which on these issues of liberty moves in lockstep. Apart from a few individuals such as David Davis and, on the press, his fellow Tories Peter Lilley and Jacob Rees Mogg, the liberal and democratic arguments are rarely being made in parliament. That is new.

Politicians are the products of society. They have changed because we have changed. We are more liberal in one sense, less in another. We have become liberals of the consumerist age, keen on personal choice and the expression of individuality, yet with little understanding of the way freedom is maintained from generation to generation: of the importance of conventions such as a free press and open and natural justice in underpinning a free society.

Today, we applaud John Stuart Mill's emphasis on self-development – "the importance, to man and society, of a large variety of types of character, and of giving full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting directions". But we seemed to have forgotten the other vital idea contained in his tract On Liberty. "The only purpose," he wrote, "for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."

In one sense, we are less serious than we used to be, perhaps too readily satisfying ourselves that if Jimmy Carr or Frankie Boyle can recite their mortifying garbage on TV, we live in a properly open, liberal society. At any rate, discussion of these issues seems unusually hard to find, particularly on the BBC, and that is because we have forgotten that proper liberal politics is not the product of some flaky political sect but a response to unrestrained power of governments in the lives of individuals.

In his book Towards the Light, the philosopher AC Grayling recalls what the Athenians said to the citizens of Melos before they massacred them and sacked their city. "You know as well as we do that right is only in question between equals in power, for the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." Liberal politics is about trying to bring about that equality of power between people and government. In supporting the press charter and the justice and security bill, the Lib Dems failed that cause.