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This comes out of a thread about New Labour's anti-social behaviour legislation. Its probably worth reading it through to get a better idea of why I started this one.
People often phrase their criticism of this sort of legislation in terms of 'civil liberties'. The idea, I think, is that civil liberties ensure the individual a certain amount of integrity and independence from the state, and that by eroding them this sort of legislation shifts the balance of power within a society. This is often reinforced by concerns about the possibility of a police or totalitarian state that might follow from such an imbalance.
In the thread, I questioned this approach, pointing out the Anti-Social Behaviour legislation, particularly the type Tony Blair recently proposed, by and large actually only affects very specific groups in society. I suggested that the more universal arguments about civil liberties tend to obscure very worrying shifts in Labour policy towards the disenfranchised and working class:
This might be a bullshit generalisation, but it feels like liberals often critique this kind of legislation with examples of good honest citizens, right on activists, etc, who suffer because it is abused. I'm just a bit uncomfortable with the 'it affects everyone! and it can be abused and used against nice people!' approach, because by and large this type of legislation actually directly affects very specific groups, who may or may not be good citizens. And it does so without any need for 'abuse' of the law.
I'm not saying that the 'civil liberties' concerns are wrong, or that raising them is illegitimate. But when they dominate a critique, particularly one of this anti-social behaviour stuff, they tend to smudge a very important dynamic in New Labour policy, hijacking it with what I'm going to tentatively call liberal middle-class concerns. This papers over things that are far more immediately worrying for people on the left.
Of course I could be wrong about that, but I thought we could discuss when and how the language of 'civil liberties' is useful, and when it is not. |
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