Thoughts on politics and life from a liberal perspective

Sunday 19 July 2009

David Cameron will not keep the promises of David Davis

As I blogged about back in March, David Davis made an impassioned speech during The Convention on Modern Liberty where he pleaded with his own party to "keep my promises". There is an mp3 of his speech available here and a transcript of it here. A key section is:

Please look at every law you pass, every law you pass, and study it so that it gives freedom, privacy, and dignity back to the people even if it is at the price of taking power away from the government from time to time.

I am all in favour of free speech and the right to demonstrate and the right to protest. But I think there are moments when our Parliament Square does look like a pretty poor place, with shanty town tents and the rest of it. I am all for demonstrations, but my argument is `Enough is enough'.

So in principle Mr Cameron is in favour of free speech and protesting but as soon as a protest starts making somewhere look a little bit messy that principle goes out of the window. It seems his commitment to free speech is extremely flaky and arbitrary.

If Mr Davis was still in the shadow cabinet, at least he would be in a position to exert some influence on this sort of authoritarian posturing but of course he isn't. It looks like his plea has fallen on deaf ears and we can look forward to much more of the same in this area as we have had from the current government should the Tories form the next one.

2 comments:

Kalvis Jansons said...

Very worrying! I hope more people pick this up.

In what areas would Cameron be better than Brown (if any)?

Cardinal Richelieu's mole said...

Cameron does have a point though. Why cannot the protest occur without the shanty town etc. defiling a place of national significance that will be viewed by many visitors to London?

Davis’ “freedom, privacy and dignity” test cuts both ways and what Cameron proposes is not bought at the worth-bearing “price of taking power away from the government from time to time”.

Much has been done by this rotten authoritarian Government that makes Davis’ plea important (for example see http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/database-state.pdf ) that makes Cameron’s proposal seem trivial - which it probably is!