Protecting Political Freedom

Abstract

Abstract This book has been rooted in a particular perspective on civil liberties, one that sees the subject as primarily concerned with the law and practice of political freedom. There are other ways of thinking about civil liberties, different kinds of emphases and analyses that produce a range of alternative means of identifying the topics that a proper treatment of our subject would rightly entail. I identified a number of these in Chapter 1 and explained why I was rejecting them. In summary, my main point was that the various meanings we ascribe to the term ‘civil liberties’ are too many and too diverse for a book of this sort to seek coherently to encompass them all. My choice to be selective in this way liberated me from the Sisyphean task of engaging in a false synthesis of conflicting propositions. Having staked out my chosen ground for the subject, I proceeded in Chapter 2 to elaborate the intellectual foundations that underpinned my approach, with Chapter 3 then supplying not only a recent history but also an assessment of the threat that political freedom faces from those concerns for national security which demand—or appear to demand—divergences from the civil libertarian ideal. With this preparatory intellectual work out of the way, the rest of the book has been about the substance of civil liberties protection in Britain, the legislation, the judicial decisions, and the executive practices that together add up to supply an answer to the question, ‘What is the state of political freedom in Britain?’.