The Freedom Movement, as we have come to know it, is going on five years old. (For those who joined it later, it began in May 2020.) It’s time to reflect on the question of what it is actually about. A popular book asked, “what price freedom?”, but we might ask, ‘what do we mean by freedom?’
To start with the obvious, we wanted, and still want, freedom from government overreach. We stood, and still stand, for the hard-won universal human rights: freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of movement and freedom of thought and opinion. As the slow train wreck of 2020–21 unfolded, we added the concept of medical freedom and freedom from experimentation.
And yet the single idea of freedom doesn’t really cover everything we want. Most of us don’t want abortion-on-demand: we don’t want to be free to murder our children. We’re more divided on euthanasia, but a large proportion of us don’t want to be free to murder ourselves or others whose lives have become unbearable.
Some of us may have been anarchists, or near-anarchists. But now it turns out that, when we think about it, we don’t want to be free to grow genetically engineered crops. We already knew that we don’t want to be free to build nuclear power stations. Now we realise that we don’t want to be free to experiment with dangerous viruses, create bioweapons, tinker with each other’s DNA or instigate frivolous wars. We would prefer to have a government strong enough to protect us from these things.
So, if it’s not just about freedom, what is our ethos? Traditional values? Not really, because a large number of us, while acknowledging the value of traditional marriage, don’t want to be overly constrained by traditional morality. We might recognise that children are a good thing, without wanting to be burdened by too many of them. And while we might complain about not getting what we want from the state schools, most of us don’t want educational freedom. Nor do we want to be economically liberated from the socialist welfare state. We enjoy complaining about the way it’s done, but, as somebody said, complaining is a form of compliance.
Civil liberty is a complex matter and, like everything else, something we don’t always agree on. But it’s good that we’ve had a taste of totalitarianism in the last few years, because a lot more people have realised what a precious thing freedom is. And it’s good that we have the Freedom Movement and the organisations that have sprung from it. May they long continue to stand and speak for the rights we didn’t realise we valued until they were gone.
