According to Benjamin Franklin’s over-used phrase, those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty or safety.
However compelling this pithy quote is, it masks the fact that you can increase both liberty and safety at the same time. This isn’t an easy task. I don’t think that anyone doubts the extraordinary pressure that Nick Clegg and other Lib Dems in government have come under when they deal with the Tories. But I certainly think that we have managed to do both.
Thanks to the Lib Dems, this is the first government for generations to increase our civil liberties – introducing a Freedoms Bill, scrapping ID cards, reducing detention without trial, ending fingerprinting in schools and improving oversight of the intelligence agencies.
It’s also a government that has seen crime fall by ten per cent since 2010. We’ve contributed to a huge reduction in the number of young people entering the criminal justice system. We’ve streamlined anti-social behaviour powers, focused on preventing crimes, and made the police more responsive to the needs of victims.
That’s why I’m cautiously optimistic about the forthcoming legislation to deal with the threat of people returning from Iraq and Syria. We don’t know the exact details of this legislation yet, and I know Parliament will want to properly scrutinise any new Bill, but at first glance it looks that it is a proportionate and sensible attempt to fill gaps in the armoury of the police and security services.
Some might want to avoid having to focus on legislation of this importance so close to an election. But this is a new and emerging problem which we can’t ignore. Many British citizens have gone out to Syria motivated by humanitarian suffering. Sadly, however, we know that some individuals have travelled abroad to fight for extremist and radical organisations, like the so-called Islamic State.
This raises the challenging question of how we protect the British public when and if those people try to return. Temporary passport seizures, aimed at preventing young people rushing abroad to fight in the conflict, sounds sensible. Similarly, the details about temporary exclusion orders look much more reasonable than some have feared. We will have to examine the details, but it makes sense to find a way of safely managing the return of suspected foreign fighters to the UK.
David Cameron talked about the possibility of making people stateless, and I’m glad that this appears to have been dropped. Similarly, formalising the way that airlines provide information on their passengers to government is long overdue.
It doesn’t take long to think back to the knee-jerk way in which Labour rolled out anti-terror legislation. Labour were and remain utterly authoritarian. They didn’t think twice about creating the most punitive measures possible, with total disregard for basic liberties.
Let’s be honest, pushing back against both the Tories and Labour is an uphill struggle. We still haven’t seen all the details of the forthcoming legislation, but I’m quietly confident that it will deal with the specific threats to British citizens, but also protect our fundamental rights and liberties.
* Malcolm Bruce was the Liberal Democrat MP for Gordon until 2015 and was Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats from 2014-15. He led the Scottish Party from 1988-92 and is now a member of the House of Lords.