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opinion BACK PA G E BY EZRA LEVANT Unclogging the arteries of liberty he U.K.'s Liberal Democrats — that coun- try's third-place party, winning more than 20 per cent of the vote in the last election — has introduced a "free- dom bill" in the House of Commons. It's well named, as it would roll back more than a dozen laws that are clogging the arteries of British liberty. "With one small change after another over the last 20 years, the cumulative loss of civil liberties is huge. The government has presided over the slow death by a thousand cuts of our hard- won British freedoms," said the Lib-Dems' Chris Huhne. It's hard to disagree. Some of the restrictions in the bill were brought in as anti-terrorism measures by the Labour government. But even law-and-order conservatives would have a tough time disagreeing with the bill's rather modest proposal to reduce the amount of time police can hold a suspect without charging him, from 28 days down to 14. (Incredibly, the Labour government recently introduced legisla- tion that would have increased it to a staggering 42). The bulk of the reforms would appeal to citizens exasperated by red tape, endless government forms, ridiculous regulations, and millions of closed-circuit TV cameras. The average Briton is caught on film 300 times a day. The U.K. is the most spied- on country in the world — it has one per cent of the world's population, but 20 per cent of its CCTV cameras. During the 1990s, fully 78 per cent of the Home Office's crime prevention budget went into TV cameras without any noticeable effect on crime rates. The dull gaze of electronic eyes is just the beginning. Fingerprinting is now startlingly commonplace, especially for children, with 3,500 primary schools collecting biometric data for things as trivial as library cards. Over a million British children have been fingerprinted, often without their parents' consent, or even notice. Other laws restrict the freedom to assemble in protest. The Public Order Act of 1986 gave police the power to break up "pub- lic assemblies" of as few as 20 people. Incredibly, the Anti-social Behaviour Act of 2003 amended that to apply to assemblies with just two people. And then there's the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act of 2005, which made it illegal to protest within a kilometre of Parliament without prior notice to the police. 54 APRIL 2009 www. mag.com Those are some of the statutes targeted by the Lib-Dems. But some of the worst don't come from Parliamentary laws, but ooze out of bureaucracy. Four new forms — including the applica- tion for the U.K.'s national ID card, and a questionnaire for Britons leaving the country — together have 153 questions for citizens. Some government data- bases have 333,000-plus bureaucrats with legit- imate access. And then there is the risk of com- puter hackers. The freedom bill coincided with a con- ference dubbed the Convention on Modern Liberty. It was attended by a spectrum of civil libertarians, from the left to the right, all united behind the idea that, as author Philip Pullman said, "We are a better people than our government believes we are." And that sums it up: if you believe your friends and neigh- bours are inherently evil and dangerous, then you wouldn't want them gathering in groups, and certainly not near Parliament. You would want children fingerprinted because it's only a mat- ter of time until they're proved to be criminals. Even banal acts, such as foreign travel, become suspicious and require a bland interrogation, but an interrogation nonetheless. It is a dark world view where freedom is sacrificed in the name of the state's con- venience. There are indeed bad people in the world whose liber- ties we all agree should be curtailed, if not snuffed out. But the obvious pointlessness of so many of these regulations — think of our airport security and inspection of toothpaste tubes — are a reminder that the all-knowing state is likely just covering up its own cluelessness with busywork. Our governments proudly announce their aversion to "profiling," but the result isn't that profiled groups are freer, it's that we're all suspects now. The war on terror and the war on crime won't be solved by treating the good guys the same way as the bad guys. Such an approach, when enshrined in law, inevitably leads to abuses, sometimes by accident but increasingly on purpose. Britain is still a free country, but less so than it once was. And we could use a freedom bill in Canada, too. Ezra Levant is a Calgary lawyer. He can be reached at ezra@ezralevant.com SCOTT PAGE