The Assault on Liberty: What Went Wrong with Rights. Dominic Raab

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СКАЧАТЬ While the British commitment to liberty withstood the assault from fascism, it faced another serious – and more sustained – onslaught, this time from the authoritarian left.

      

      Writing around the same period as Mill, Karl Marx was contemptuous of the idea of liberty evolving in Britain in the nineteenth century. For Marx, rights epitomized a corrupt egoism, separating the individual from his real identity, absorbed as part of society: ‘Liberty, therefore, is the right to do everything that harms no-one else…It is a question of the liberty of man as an isolated monad withdrawn into himself.’

      Marx argued that the individual would only be free once he conceived himself in terms of a wider collective. Marx criticized rights as purely formal legal constructs, divorced from any real or meaningful content – a right to property is meaningless to the homeless, free speech of limited value to the starving. In fact, liberty was worse than irrelevant because it crystallized unjust – middle-class – privileges at the expense the working class. As Lenin claimed: ‘Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.’

      Marx’s theory of class struggle was based on the imperative to realize the real needs of humankind rather than the artificial attachment of a liberal and bourgeois elite to an arbitrary selection of formal rights that perpetuate an unjust status quo.

      Fellow communists like Engels asserted – somewhat counter-intuitively – that ‘Freedom is the recognition of necessity’. The logical implications for the individual were sobering. Individual worth must be subordinated to the overriding imperative driving a Marxist society towards inevitable class struggle and revolution. Real freedom can only be achieved by recognizing and participating in that emancipation of the downtrodden from the shackles of capitalism.

      Built on these philosophical foundations, socialism and communism were constructed in direct and aggressive antagonism to individual liberty. Marxism is all too willing to sacrifice the individual for the collective good. Communist revolutionaries were thereby given ample ideological justification for repressing individual liberty, captured by Lenin’s cold observation that: ‘Liberty is precious – so precious that it must be rationed.’

      Armed with this moral justification, communist governments across the world routinely engaged in the most egregious human rights abuses throughout the twentieth century. This dogmatic ideological commitment to the collective allowed the most basic individual liberties to be easily brushed aside. It is estimated that the Soviet regime killed almost sixty-two million over a seventy-year period in the name of the socialist revolution, twenty million of whom died under Stalin. Some were executed, some died during famines precipitated by coercive Soviet economic policy and others perished in the gulag or working on slave-labour construction projects. Communist China’s Great Leap Forward, between 1958 and 1962, created mass famine that killed between twenty and thirty million. Yet neither Stalin nor Mao could match the Khmer Rouge for pure ferocity. The Khmer Rouge slaughtered two million out of eight million Cambodians – a quarter of the entire population – in an effort to purify Cambodia of all bourgeois influences and drag the country towards the mirage of communist utopia.

      Subsequent communist governments recognized the atrocities of earlier regimes, perpetrated in the name of socialist revolution. Deng Xiaoping declared that Mao had only been 70 per cent right and Khrushchev criticized Stalin’s reign of terror. But such abuse of power was explained as a misapplication of socialism. Ironically, Khrushchev blamed the individualism of the Stalinist cult – rather than the totalitarian state – for ‘mass repressions and brutal acts of violation of Socialist legality’. Stalin’s excesses did not give grounds for an ideological shift – Marxism and liberty remained incompatible and irreconcilable – leaving intact the ideological weapon with which to attack personal freedoms.

      During the Cold War, communist governments also relied on the Marxist conception of freedom to avoid signing up to human rights treaties. Two international human rights lawyers summarized the relationship between socialism and human rights: ‘Since the State by definition represents the interests of the people, the citizens can have no rights against the State…The socialist State expresses the will of the mass of the workers, and the individual owes it absolute obedience.’

      Throughout this period the Soviet Union and other communist governments relied on their very different conception of freedom, and their cynical view of individual liberty, to avoid assuming any international human rights obligations under the guise that they would ‘interfere with domestic affairs’ and ‘sovereignty’.

      However, the spread of socialist ideas beyond the Soviet bloc generated a number of treaties providing for social and economic rights, a more subtle reflection of the Marxist critique that civil and political liberties did not address people’s real needs. The International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights 1966 included rights to work, a fair wage, healthcare, education, the right to take part in cultural life and the right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress. In reality, the Covenant reflected aspirations not rights. These new rights could not be judicially enforced in domestic courts in the way that, for example, illegal detention can be challenged or the right to protest asserted in specific cases.

      This attempted compromise, coupling civil and political liberties with other ‘rights’, was reflected in the approach of continental European governments, which had historically, philosophically and culturally been much more susceptible to socialist influence. The development of social democratic movements on the continent can be seen as an attempt to forge a compromise between the two conceptions of freedom that otherwise stand in clear and unequivocal conflict with each other. The influence of this attempted synthesis – between Marxism and liberalism – has extended beyond domestic politics, to the development of a common European identity through the supranational institutions of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and the EU in Brussels.

      

      In Britain these twin strands of socialism lay beneath the surface of the New Labour project that swept Tony Blair into power in 1997. Both ran against the traditional grain of British liberty. Marx had a less powerful, but nonetheless enduring, influence in Britain. New Labour had successfully concealed, rather than extinguished, the orthodox brand of socialism, and Tony Blair managed formally to dislocate the Labour Party from the dogma of public ownership of the means of production during his famous ‘Clause Four’ moment in 1994. Nevertheless, the Labour Party’s updated constitution still stubbornly described it as a ‘socialist’ party.

      Looking around the table at Tony Blair’s new Cabinet of Ministers in May 1997 and more broadly across the corridors of power in Whitehall, a surprising number of ministers and key advisers, including John Reid and Peter Mandelson, were formerly Communist Party members, allies or associates – including two Home Secretaries, until recently the cabinet minister responsible for the Human Rights Act. Other cabinet ministers with previous communist or Trotskyite connections include Charles Clarke, Stephen Byers and Alan Milburn. Marxism had been a key influence on them during their formative years, and once in power they were not passive bystanders. They propelled the New Labour agenda and rose rapidly through the ministerial ranks. Given the Marxist antagonism towards individual freedoms, they were unlikely to provide an instinctive defence of British liberty, and more likely to join – if not drive – the imminent assault.

      If what one commentator has called the ‘liberty reflex’ was replaced with a Marxist disposition amongst a leading cabal in government, there was a further – more surreptitious – thread running through the New Labour machine, most notably Tony Blair, which would further erode the British tradition of liberty from an altogether different direction. The new Prime Minister was determined to ‘lead in Europe’, putting Britain at the vanguard of European policy-making after years of Conservative foot-dragging. While successive administrations had sought to ignore the growing irritant created by adverse rulings, and the increasing rate of СКАЧАТЬ