A movement has been formed with Henry Porter at it's head. They're doing a conference. They have a blog. It's all happening. Speakers include Iain Dale, David Elstein (the most committed and cynical campaigner against Public Service Broadcasting) and Dominic Grieve. 'Partners' include the Centre for Policy Studies and the Campaign for an English Parliament.
Oddly, you would have thought that Conor Gearty would have been asked to speak. Gearty is easily the most credible writer that I've found on the subject of civil liberties and he has a very good recent book to plug. For him, the whole question is inseparable from that of Representative Democracy - he sees the right to vote (and the right to vote within the context of Representative Democracy) as the core civil liberty. It is a liberty that is not especially valued by many (perhaps most?) of the speakers and partners of that conference.
Looking at that list of speakers, in almost every case, they have been flaky on that particular subject at some point. I would plot most of these people on the wrong side of the 'direct democracy / representative democracy' axis (or - following that link, dangerously high on the idealist/cynic scale).
Here's Gearty a while ago in The Guardian. I was going to selectively cut-and-paste a few choice sentences from it, but really, everyone who is thinking of going to that conference should read the whole thing - and hang around a bookshop long enough to get the gist of Conor's excellent book.
This fetishisation of individual liberties - one that works, at least in part,in opposition to Representative Democracy - needs to be opposed a good deal more that it is being at the moment.
technorati tags:
political news | news | world news
More at: News 2 Cromley
No comments:
Post a Comment