CONFERENCE PAPER: HOW WE UNDERSTAND FREEDOM

Paper given by Brendan O'Neill

INTRODUCTION

Over the past week, two stories relating to freedom have caught my eye. In the first, it was revealed that as of July all British passports will include biometric data, and eventually a computer chip containing our personal information. Civil rights groups, understandably, were not pleased. They said this was a clear case of bringing in “ID cards by the backdoor”; it was a “draconian measure”, they said, evidence that Britain is turning into a “police state”.

In the second story, it was announced that a new pilot scheme is underway in Yeovil in Somerset. Six of Yeovil’s main superpubs and nightclubs are starting to finger-scan their customers. They are asking all patrons to register their personal details, have their photo taken and submit to a biometric finger scan. All the info will then be stored on a computer -- which means that the next time a troublemaker pops his finger into the machine at the entrance to his favourite pub or club, the bouncers will know instantly to turn him away.

There was very little protest about that new initiative, no complaints of a new “police state”. Police forces around the country and the Home Office are watching how the Yeovil scheme progresses with an eye for repeating it elsewhere. And indeed, it was reported that youthful revellers in Yeovil think the scheme is a good idea and have been enthusiastically submitting their fingers to be scanned. In other words, far from protesting, they volunteered themselves to be monitored; they effectively offered themselves up as objects of suspicion who must be closely watched by local pub landlords and bouncers.

You might think to yourself, it’s only Yeovil, who cares? From what I’ve heard it might even be a sensible measure in those parts. But I think the difference between these two stories, between the passport incident and the Yeovil incident, reveals something telling about how we view freedom today:

-- It shows that formal freedoms are still debated and sometimes defended -- while informally, in our social lives, working lives and personal lives, freedom seems to be of little moment. Activists and thinkers will defend formal freedoms such as not having to carry around ID or the right to free speech -- but informally, in everyday life and everyday relations, freedom seems to have little purchase and is easily bargained off.

-- Also, the Yeovil story shows that one of the main problems today is not a totalitarian elite taking our freedoms away, but the fact that various groups and constituencies in society are initiating or going along with the constraint of freedom. Freedom today is often undermined, not so much systematically from above, but arbitrarily and with a wink and a nod rather than a written decree by a malign government. So in Yeovil, the finger-scanning plan is largely the brainchild of local landlords and nightclub owners. A major problem today is a broader culture of unfreedom, what we might call a “logic of restraint”, which permeates all kinds of situations and institutions.

-- And finally, and perhaps most worryingly, the Yeovil scheme seems to suggest that often we are complicit in the constraint of our own freedom -- we welcome, or at least go along with, measures that curtail our liberty and which very often treat us as children. One question I would like to ask today is whether one of the problems we face is that alongside the authorities having designs on our freedoms, we do not trust ourselves to be free.

FREEDOM AND HUMANITY

Different historical moments attach different value and meaning to freedom -- and in our historical moment, freedom is not valued very much at all. Today there is an emphasis on constraining freedom over celebrating it. People pay lip service to freedom all of the time, and there are often very public wrangles over freedom -- but fundamentally freedom is seen as problematic, unpredictable, possibly even dangerous, and its being eroded in numerous, often insidious ways.

How we view freedom reveals a great deal about how we view humanity itself. In more upbeat, dynamic and optimistic times, freedom tends to be given greater weight -- the balance is in favour of celebrating liberty rather than trying to rein it in and keep it under lock and key. Consider the Bill of Rights that amended the American Constitution in 1789, following the American War of Independence. That is a fiery document which guarantees the right to a free press, to free speech, to religious worship, to protest, even the right to bear arms should the state become tyrannical and have to be dealt with by the people.

What is our equivalent today? The European Convention on Human Rights, incorporated into British law by the Human Rights Act in 1998 -- a turgid and sometimes unreadable document, with so many qualifications and ifs and buts that by the time you get to the end of it (if you ever get to the end of it) you’re uncertain which freedoms you possess. Where the US Bill of Rights was about restraining the state, human rights legislation is often about restraining human passions and potential conflict. The Bill of Rights basically called for the state to butt out of certain areas of human life and activity; it was an instruction to the state to mind its own business, to NOT make laws restricting freedom, to NOT imprison people without due process. Human rights legislation, by contrast, encourages state intervention into our lives to manage what it sees as our conflicting freedoms -- it encourages arbitration to balance one person’s right to privacy with a newspaper’s right to publish material about that person; one person’s right to a quiet life with another person’s right to play loud music.

The Bill of Rights was about leaving people to their own devices, trusting that they could get on with things without state intervention; human rights legislation is a device for further state intervention to manage human relations and balance liberties. The Bill of Rights implied that people were rational, capable and generally trustworthy; human rights legislation implies that we are petty, sometimes vindictive and in need of benign direction from above.

The value we give freedom reveals the value we attach to ourselves. In earlier times, great emphasis has been put on protecting and celebrating freedom of speech; the Bill of Rights said the state should make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” This was informed by a view of people as rational agents, who through free and open debate were capable of working out truth from falsehood and making an intelligent choice between competing visions.

Today by contrast, freedom of speech is continually undermined or watered down -- and these constraints are informed by a view of people as fickle, corruptible and easily led. So, the speech of racist organisations like the BNP is restricted because it is feared that they will stir the white working classes to commit acts of racial hatred and violence; the masses are seen as a pogrom waiting to happen. The speech of radical Islamic clerics is restricted on the basis that they might convince young Muslims to truss themselves up as human bombs and kill themselves and scores of civilians. Where earlier generations celebrated free speech, we view it suspiciously, because we tend to view people suspiciously.

So, our attitudes to freedom are shaped by our attitudes to each other, by the broader political and cultural climate. At times when human nature is viewed positively, as a force for change and even good, there is a tolerance of free speech and of social experimentation. Today, the opposite is the case. We could argue that the major threat to freedom now is misanthropy rather than totalitarianism. It is not that there is an overbearing and politically ambitious elite taking away our rights in order to secure its own power base, but that there is a generalised degraded view of people as corrosive and toxic, which is giving rise to new forms of censorship and restraint.

FORMAL AND INFORMAL FREEDOMS

It may seem strange to say that we don’t value freedom today. Debates about freedom are rarely out of the news. There were loud protests by civil rights groups and lawyers against the government’s anti-terror bill for riding roughshod over habeus corpus and for further restricting free speech. Newspaper columnists and opposition politicians have continually berated the government over its religious hatred law. And there are high-level campaigns against the introduction of ID cards, which, it is said, will turn Britain into a police state. To most observers, it must seem as though there is a ruthless government on one hand and defenders of liberty on the other -- and that there is a fresh and lively debate about freedom in Britain in the twenty-first century.

Formal freedoms are essential, and they should be defended to the hilt. The Manifesto Club opposes all government restraints on free speech, freedom of movement and association, the right to trial by jury, the right to silence, or any of the formal freedoms won over the centuries. However, this continuing debate, mostly taking place between ministers and commentators, about the importance of historic and formal freedoms seems to coexist perfectly well with a pretty unprecedented corrosion of informal and everyday freedom. While various civil libertarians get worked up about ID cards or the right to criticise religions, they say little, virtually nothing in fact, about the more mundane and arbitrary encroachments into our personal lives -- which, I want to argue, are often far worse than any anti-terror legislation.

Let me give you an example. This year there have been ongoing protests against the government’s overzealous anti-terror security measures but there was not a jot of protest when the government announced that it would be compiling a list of all the millions of people who work or come into contact with children. In January, education secretary Ruth Kelly announced new vetting procedures, where every adult who works with children, or whose work “offers them the opportunity of regular contact with children”, will be listed, vetted and monitored to ensure that they are not weird or perverted. Just so you know, that adds up to 9.5 million people, including teachers, school caretakers, dinners ladies, lollipop ladies, nurses, doctors, nannies, childminders, home tutors, social workers, sports instructors, priests, policemen and care workers. For good measure it also includes hospital cleaners, catering staff, those who deal with children over the phone or the internet, and those who voluntarily run local sports clubs or after-school activities. McCarthy-style, all of these people will now have their names and details centralised in the name of protecting children from what the government calls “unsuitable individuals”.

These measures to police adult-child relations are, in my view, a far graver assault on liberty than the government’s illiberal curbing of speech and association in the name of combating terrorism. Where anti-terror measures are least intended only to be temporary, to deal with a so-called “emergency”, the child workers’ list is a permanent measure. Where anti-terror measures are directed at small groups of people -- although, of course, they are often wielded clumsily and indiscriminately -- the adult vetting scheme is directed at a full one-sixth of the population. Where anti-terror measures are built on the bullshit notion that a few mad mullahs pose a threat to civilisation -- a notion easily challenged with some facts and debate -- the vetting of adults stems from the far more dangerous idea that adults cannot be trusted to care for or communicate with children. One of the most fundamental and fruitful relationships -- that between adult and child, whether in an educational or recreational capacity -- has now been poisoned by a blanket suspicion of all adults.

There are numerous examples of everyday, informal freedom being corroded in the shadow of the debate about defending formal freedoms:

-- Smoking bans -- restraints in pubs, workplaces, even the home. Children now encouraged to berate their parents, as shown in new government ad campaign.

-- The policing of patients -- doctors used by the government, midwives spying on mums-to-be.

-- Speech codes -- college campuses, stipulations on how to conduct ourselves, talk to each other, sleep with each other. Also undermines professor-student relationship.
-- Harassment codes -- increasing suspicion and wariness between work colleagues.

-- Advertising -- increasing number of guidelines on what can and cannot be shown, and when. Demands for bans on junk-food advertising -- because apparently parents cannot resist pester power.

What we can glimpse in many of these instances is that there is a broader suspicion of freedom today, of leaving people to their own devices. It is seen as undesirable, if not positively dangerous, to leave work colleagues to get along, college students to work out their personal relations for themselves, parents to care for their children, public houses to negotiate with smokers where they can indulge their filthy habit and where they cannot. We can also see that it’s not always the case that the government is removing our freedoms -- rather, various institutions and groups are limiting other people’s freedoms. Universities, workplaces and even local communities are very often at the forefront of calling for an imposing restrictions on people’s liberty. A widespread sense of mistrust has given rise to a “logic of restraint”, a desire to rein people in and keep a close eye on them -- and the thinking behind such measures is more of a problem for us, I would argue, than is the government’s overblown claims about the threat of terrorism or inter-communal violence or whatever.

Our aim is to shake up the discussion about freedom. Even those who defend freedom today, who defend formal freedoms from government intrusion, do so within very strict limits. They balk at the idea of “absolute freedom”, for example -- they will defend certain kinds of free speech but not absolute free speech; the right to choose an abortion within a certain timeframe but not any time during nine months of pregnancy. And often they are motivated by a quite conservative and undemocratic instinct. Their aim is to further formalise freedom, in fact to elevate it above the messy business of life, love and politics in order to preserve it forever. For example, Henry Porter of the Observer recently got into a debate with Tony Blair about the importance of freedom. He argued: “We need a written code which entrenches rights and the rule of law, for now and future generations, a code which may never be altered or distorted…that should be the urgent concern of all democrats.” We can glimpse a conservative sentiment here – the desire to ENTRENCH rights and CODIFY liberties. This is about turning freedom into stone, ossifying it, elevating it above the apparently grubby world of politics and debate and everyday life.

INTERNALISING ANTI-FREEDOM

So, the new culture of unfreedom, the presumption of restraint and caution, can be worse than the old-fashioned totalitarian assaults on liberty. This new culture does two problematic things in particular:

-- It encourages us to internalise unfreedom, to become distrustful of ourselves and our own judgement;

-- It formalises human relations, robbing them of their dynamism, unpredictability and easiness, and instead creating barriers between people at work, between doctor and patient, professor and student, teacher and child, even between parent and child.

This is where we can glimpse what is truly Orwellian about today. The word “Orwellian” is bandied about a lot today, and often inaccurately. The government’s anti-terror measures or ID cards or declaration of permanent war on terrorism are compared to the horrors of life under Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984. But the real horror of Orwell’s dystopia was not the neverending war or the boot stamping on a human face, but rather the regulation of personal relationships, which created a poisonous climate of self-doubt and mistrust.

When O’Brian tortures Winston Smith he says: “We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman.” Today we can see a similar process in the formalisation of everyday human relations both at work and at home. O’Brian says: “No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer.” In the world of 1984, “it was almost normal for people over 30 to be frightened of their own children.” We can this today in the way women are encouraged to report every domestic incident to the authorities and children are used to blackmail their parents out of smoking or drinking. Winston Smith lived in a world that did not trust people to be left to their own devices, and so do we.

What does freedom mean to us? It means having formal rights but also informal freedoms; it means opposing state interference in our right to speak or protest but also injecting everyday life with a new spirit of self-confidence, openness and critical questioning. It means having the right to free speech, public protest, trial by jury, and also believing that parents know best for their kids, work colleagues would get on better without a plethora of codes, and teaching and learning would flourish without the formalisation of teacher-pupil and professor-student relationships. It means believing in ourselves and trusting each other. It means challenging the contemporary idea that people cannot be trusted to know their own minds and to relate and work with others.

Anyone interested in rescuing and redefining humanism must surely begin by challenging the anti-humanist ideas that underpin the varied and myriad attacks on freedom today. By doing so, we can make everyday life more pleasant, and create the kind of climate in which become more critical and questioning and hopefully open to our ideas.

CONFERENCE PAPER: THE ROLE OF THE STATE

Paper given by James Panton

The relationship between individuals and the state has been radically transformed in the last couple of decades.

The clearest way to illustrate the relationship between individuals and the state is in terms of the way that rights are currently understood. What I’m going to argue is that rights, which were originally conceived as markers of, and means towards, the achievement of individual autonomy and collective self determination, are now conceived in terms of an image of individuals who are vulnerable, incapable and incapacitated. It is around this model of the citizen that the state is now organised. And this has very serious implications, I think, for the way that an attempt to develop a more progressive social agenda has to view the current discussion of rights.

1. History

The debate over rights until recently took the form of a political debate between defenders of liberty, individual sovereignty, and the free market, who sought to defend the individual against the encroachments of the state, AND the assertion of a more positive, welfare oriented, leftist vision of collective rights and social welfare.

The Libertarian account of rights is organised around the idea of a self-determining, autonomous individual. His rights are those of “life, liberty and the pursuit of property”, as Adam Smith had it – or “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” – as Jefferson reformulated the claim in the American Declaration of Independence.

This is an individual who has a sphere of negative or formal freedoms from state intervention. Along with the right to self-ownership, property, and to pursue his vision of the good life, this sovereign individual also has the right to believe what he thinks is true, to argue for those beliefs with others without fear of censorship or recrimination, and to associate with other individuals to better pursue his interests.

What this model assumes is that, left to his own devices, the individual is the best judge, and the final arbiter, of his own freedom.

The very formal nature of these libertarian negative rights is both their great strength and their greatest limitation.

Their strength is that they establish a vision of the individual as autonomous and self-determining; an vision which I think underpins the possibility of any meaningful democratic social organisation.

But it is their weakness that in being purely formal, while provide all citizens with a sphere of freedom from intervention, this in no way ensures that the individual is able to act freely – to determine his own life, and to pursue his own interests. In reality, while negative rights applied to all citizens, they were actionable only by those who already the social power and wealth to pursue them on their own terms.

-- The right to property, and thus to the free disposal of one’s property, seems pretty meaningless to an individual who, in order to survive, has no option but to sell his labour on the terms set by his employer.

-- And the right to the pursuit of happiness may seem empty to a sick individual who lacks the means and funds to seek medical treatment for his ailments.

Towards the end of the 19th century, this became abundantly clear as the ranks of the citizenry was filled with individuals lacking wealth and power, but keen to pursue their capacity for self-determination. It was the Left, the Labour Movement, and those Liberals concerned with greater social justice, who took up the call for a more meaningful account of rights. In order that the majority might be in a position to exercise their freedom and autonomy, they needed the means, the social resources, and the goods that society could provide.

-- The development of employment legislation in the latter decades of the 19th century was one such positive step that began the long slow process of making more equal the relationship between employer and employee.

-- The emergence of state funded education, then state funded health care, culminating in the founding of the Welfare State after the Second World War, are all further examples of the state’s provision of the positive conditions through which greater freedom and autonomy could be enjoyed by the majority.

The political contestation between Right and Left, Free-Market and Social Welfare, was a struggle around the best way in which class society could be organise to realise the human capacity for freedom and self-determination. They were contestations over social power and the distribution of the social product. The different sides differed in their understanding of that freedom and self-determination, and they struggled over the political organisation that could achieve it. But they were united by a belief that freedom, autonomy and self-determination were capacities that human all human being shared.

2. The Enabling State:

In the post-war period, the founding of the Welfare State, and the organisation of political legitimation around it, suggested that the advocates of positive rights and social welfare had one the day. But by the 1980s the Welfare consensus was un-ravelling, less due to criticism from outside that due to the undermining of its underlying philosophy that resulted from the retreat of politics, and the loss of faith in a vision of humanity as progressive and free – the very retreat from politics we discussed this morning.

By the early 1990s a new model of the state had emerged, and around which individuals across the political spectrum were coalescing. This was not a “providing” Welfare State, but an “empowering” or Enabling State. Where the Welfare State would provide the goods and services that the majority required, the Enabling State would seek to empower this majority through providing the tools and skills to take greater responsibility for their own lives, be it in the sphere of health, education, or government.

However, I want to suggest that there is a real paradox behind this notion of empowerment in the enabling state. Let me give you a couple of examples.

-- In the sphere of education, we have moved from a vision in which it was assumed that children, if provided with the education, skills and knowledge, could develop on their own into autonomous citizens; towards a vision in which the state plays an increasingly explicit role in socializing children to become good citizens. This is the reason that citizenship education is at the heart of current education initiatives.

-- In the sphere of health, we have moved from a vision in which health care was provided in order that individuals could recover from illness and return to take their role in society as quickly as possible, to a vision in which the enabling state plays an increasing explicit role in advising us and training us in how to stay healthy – what to eat, how to exercise, how not to drink and especially how not to smoke.

The paradox is that the explicit aim of empowering us to take more responsibility for our lives is underpinned by a view of individual who, in the absence of third party intervention, cannot possibly navigate their way through life. It is a vision which begins from the premise of individuals as vulnerable and incapable, and moves through an attempt to educate, cajole, and construct us as good citizens.

3. The New Vision of Rights:

This underlying pessimism about the capacities of individuals is expressed very clearly in the vision of rights that has come to prominence under the Enabling State. This is a vision of Rights which has its origins in the rise of Human Rights in the Post War period.

A comparison of the conception of rights that underpinned the founding of the United States and the end of the 18th century, and the conception of rights that founded the European Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Liberties in the 1950s, can illustrate the fundamental difference.

The First Amendment to the American Constitution state: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Here, the legal capacity of the state to legislate is hemmed in by the condition that laws passed do not impinge upon the rights which individuals already possess.

By contrast, Article 1 of the European Convention begins: “The High Contracting Parties [that is States] shall secure to everyone within their jurisdiction the rights and freedoms defined in Section 1 of this Convention”.

Rights, in other words, are not held before States, but are rather supplied by them.

In the Human Rights Doctrine, individuals are no longer seen to be the active parties; their rights are no longer a marker, much less an expression, of their agency. On the contrary, it is the state that is the agent of rights; it is the state that provides rights, secures them, and ultimately, enacts them on our behalf.

4. Children’s Rights – the paradigm example:

The implications of this are brought out very clearly in the example of children’s rights – an understanding of rights that I think is paradigmatic of the rights we have under the Enabling State.

The 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child begins by noting that “childhood is entitled to special care and assistance”, and that the child, “by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care”.

Almost all of the conventions 52 Article then begin with the statement that “States” must ensure, safeguard, or secure, children’s rights. Less often, the Articles will outline the responsibility of parents or guardians to ensure the protection of their child’s rights.

This isn’t surprising. Because of the very “physical and mental immaturity” of children – the very thing that makes them children and not adults – children obviously cannot be expected to enact their own rights. It seems obvious that if children are to have rights they must be enacted on behalf of children, by a third party – parents, or in the logic of the Convention, more often than not, by the State.

The confusing thing here, however, is that if rights have been entirely dislocated from the vision of human agency and activity that underpinned rights as they were understood through the political struggles of the late 19th and 20th century, then what do we mean when we talk about rights now?

Once rights have lost their mooring in the individual subjects who bear and enact them, they float loose. They become empty categories which we apply wherever and whenever we find something of particular value.

It is because we value the security of children that we endow them with rights. But what this really means is that we seek to give children special protection precisely because they are particularly vulnerable.

It is then only a short step from the idea the children have rights to the idea that animals have rights. Like children, they lack autonomy, but like children, they are seen to be in need of “special care and attention”. And from animal rights, we can move further: what about the rights of the generations who are not yet borne – surely we have a duty to ensure that they have a world left to them that is fit to live in? Surely that is their right? Or even inanimate objects. What about the rights of the environment not to be abused, or the rights of the natural world to be maintained in its current state without the destructive intervention of humans.

Once rights have lost their relationship to active subjects, they become applicable to the passive entities – to children who are not yet fully social and autonomous; to animals who lack autonomy altogether, to the natural world.

But when rights are applied in this way, our vision of rights, and the way they are enacted, comes to assume the passivity of their bearers. Adult citizens, who are inherently vulnerable and in need of guidance, have rights in so far as these rights can help to educate them in the duties of good citizenship. Adult citizens are reduced to the level or children or animals in need of protection – from each other, perhaps even from themselves.

We are granted rights by the state, on condition that we use them correctly. Hence:

-- If I have a right to speak freely, I also have a responsibility not to offend others

-- If I have a right to dispose of my free time as I please, I also have a responsibility not to annoy my neighbours

-- If I have a right to health care, I also have a responsibility to look after myself – to watch my weight, to drink sensibly, to exercise regularly.

Any Right under the enabling state entails a concomitant responsibility. Should I fail to enact my responsibilities, the state is there to empower me: to help me to achieve my potential as a good citizen. Should this assistance fail, of course, since only the state is in a position to enact and defend my rights, it is also in a position to curtail or remove them.

It is important to note that this is not something which is imposed upon us by an authoritarian state. Rather, rights are gifted to us, as all privileges are. In the contemporary language of politics, the pursuit of my freedom, whether individually or collectively, is transformed into an appeal to the state to grant me rights. And this is indeed the paradoxical vision of freedom many of us appeal to: to the State to guarantee our rights against troublesome neighbours, or towards better health; to defend our children against strangers; to defend laboratory animals against the abuse of vivisectionists….. The list goes on.

In this way, the assumption of vulnerability with which the Enabling State views its citizens becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is the arbiter of all conflicts; the guarantor of social justice; and the condition upon which we exists as political citizens.

We have moved a long way from rights as they were understood in the political conflicts of the 19th and 20th century. The current language of rights lacks all relationship to the formal negative rights of libertarians which, for all their limitations, nonetheless provided a framework of autonomy and individual sovereignty around which democratic politics could be organised. And we have moved even further from the vision of those Leftists and Welfare Liberals who saw collective or social rights and the means by which social iniquities could be redressed, and through which the majority could engage in an attempt to build a better world for themselves. Lacking faith in autonomy, we are no longer seen to be free in our sphere of non-intervention. And lacking the possibility to navigate our way through life without continual assistance an enabling, there is no possibility that we might engage in a project of social rights towards greater welfare, re-distribution, social justice, or a better world.

Conclusion:

So, what is to be done?

I think first of all we need to be very suspicious of the language of rights at the moment which actually serves to limit our ability to take responsibility for ourselves and our actions.

In the absence of a vision of human autonomy, we need to recognise that appeals to positive rights, of whatever form, have become meaningless. Calls for redistribution, welfare and social justice made sense in a context of politics who’s very aim was the realisation of self-determination and greater freedom. If self-determination and freedom are off the agenda, positive rights can mean only an appeal to the state to intervene yet further, and enfeeble us even more.

I think second, we need to note that the simple fact of asserting and defending our autonomy – our capacity to regulate our own lives, to live as responsible adults and democratic citizens without the need for constant third party interventions – this becomes an essential political act. It becomes a way of establishing a vision of ourselves as self-determining individuals, who might even be able to engage in a progressive politics that seeks to take hold of the future.

What we need to do, therefore, is to establish a culture which views the aspiration to autonomy in positive terms, and a network of relationships that can be supportive for individuals who want to exercise their freedom. And I think this one of the most important tasks that the Manifesto Club ought to set itself.