For those who weren’t too overcome by the emotion of the day (Labour Party members), the aplomb of the speech (political journalists) or boredom (everyone else), Tony Blair’s final leader’s speech to the Labour Party conference did have some substance to it. He began a section on liberty in the twenty-first century by reassuring us: 'I don't want to live in a police state, or a Big Brother society or put any of our essential freedoms in jeopardy. But because our idea of liberty is not keeping pace with change in reality, those freedoms are in jeopardy.'

Blair wanted to make the case that '[w]e can only protect liberty by making it relevant to the modern world'. In scrutinising his words more closely, however, it is apparent that it is Blair’s idea of liberty that is doing all the legwork here – rather than the pressing exigencies of the modern world.

To see this, we need to first capture what Blair seems to mean by ‘liberty’. Following Isaiah Berlin, political philosophy has tended to see the issue through the lens of two types of freedom: negative liberty and positive liberty. Negative liberty has traditionally been seen as ‘freedom from’ the state – the greatest source of authority in society – preserving for the individual an inviolable sphere where the government may not tread. Inside this safe haven we can exercise our liberties and act unobstructed, confident in the knowledge that the government’s writ does not here run.

Blair’s idea of liberty is also of the negative, ‘freedom from’ variety – but not as we know it. Rather than freedom from the arbitrary exercise of state authority, Blair believes that a twenty-first-century idea of liberty is freedom from the malign forces within society. He speaks of being free from organised criminals, who damage the lives and liberties of 'countless young people' with 'their evil'. Freedom from anti-social behaviour is also central to Blair’s conception of liberty, as 'every member of the community in which it happens, has their human rights broken'.

The irony is that the remedy to these problems, for us to be ‘free from’ society’s criminal disturbances that is, we are to welcome the state in to our previously inviolable individual spheres – thus perverting what are the attractions of negative liberty as a stateless space in the first place!

Blair’s idea of liberty has us compelled to submit our biometric data to create ID cards, as 'an essential part of responding to the reality of modern migration and protecting us against identity fraud'. And it wants us to find heartening the idea of a DNA database for criminals, which 'some said was a monstrous breach of liberty', yet 'is now matching over 3,000 offences a month'. This is a bit like saying: 'Hey, forget about those concerns about liberty and state power because – look! – it works.'

Did we miss a trick? How do you manage to take the tradition of negative liberty and distort it so? Well, Blair’s sleight of hand in the speech was to give the idea of globalisation an unstoppable argumentative force so that state interference into our lives was seen as imperative – desirable, even – lest we be swept away by the winds of change. He stressed that in this 'new world' we needed state power to 'reconcile liberty with security' – explaining his statement above that 'liberty is not keeping pace with changes in reality'.

Having found his hook, Blair was happy to use the globalisation excuse to justify state intervention, even if the problems it purported to confront had nothing to do with globalisation at all. What can apparently anti-social behaviour in Britain’s town centres have to do with globalisation?

In common parlance ‘globalisation’ is a buzzword, associated with so many phenomena that it has become almost meaningless. So why does Blair need to have recourse to so nebulous a term when justifying his government’s interventions? It is because his New Labour party lacks a more inspiring vision of what our freedoms are for – a project that captures not only the ideological assent, but also the affective sway of the British people.

Going back to Berlin’s distinction, what New Labour and Tony Blair have always lacked is some account of our ‘positive liberty’, of what our freedoms should be for. For the Hegelian scholar Charles Taylor, positive liberty is 'the freedom to do, realise…or become something'. In the past, the Labour Party’s version of positive liberty was equality of outcome, where it was seen as heralding a just society and the realisation of the Good Life. Without such a vision of human flourishing and where it will take us, the state’s interventions into our lives, ostensibly on our behalf, lack real legitimacy and we are left instead with Blair’s catchphrase exhortations on globalisation.

It is more important now than ever to preserve the meaning of negative liberty as freedom from state interference. Civil society needs a stateless space in which to debate a way forward for our society to find a real, positive, response to the twenty-first century and its challenges that is away from both Tony Blair and the state.

Ben Walford