The dafodils of freedom...

Various folk have commented on the case of the daffodils – or rather the picking of daffodils.

Sienna Marengo was picking flowers with her sister India, 10, and step-sister Olivia, six, when they were spotted by a passing councillor who reported the incident to the police.

Two officers then warned the girls’ mother, Jane Errington, 35, that she and her partner Marc Marengo, 49, could be arrested for theft and criminal damage before moving them on.

Now much of this is about the pettiness of this act, the waste of police time and the impact on the two small children involved in the terrible picking incident! But in one comment – essentially a defence of the busybody – from Deborah Orr an important philosophical term was purloined and misused:

Yet there is one aspect of this case that does pinpoint a distinctive feature of contemporary British life, and that is a widespread and powerful attachment to "negative liberty", in which people want very much to be able to get on with their own business without do-gooders or agents of the state interfering, yet tend to engage little with the concept of freedom and how it works at a societal level.

The term – as the eagle-eyed reader will have spotted – is “negative liberty”. What Ms Orr implies – pretty strongly – is that such an attitude is a mere bagatelle next to how freedom works “at a societal level”. I’m sure there will be dissenters but the initiator of the idea of “negative and positive liberty” was Isaiah Berlin and his use of the words “negative” and “positive” was not intended to reflect “good” or “bad”. Berlin, by using “negative” meant the absence of controls, restrictions or bans – the idea that we are free to act.

The problem for Ms Orr is, of course, that Berlin wasn’t especially keen on “positive liberty” – on liberty at the “societal level”:

Berlin says, the defender of positive freedom will take an additional step that consists in conceiving of the self as wider than the individual and as represented by an organic social whole — “a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet unborn”. The true interests of the individual are to be identified with the interests of this whole, and individuals can and should be coerced into fulfilling these interests, for they would not resist coercion if they were as rational and wise as their coercers. “Once I take this view”, Berlin says, “I am in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture in the name, and on behalf, of their ‘real’ selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the true goal of man ... must be identical with his freedom” (Berlin 1969, pp. 132-33).

The point here is that “negative liberty” is, indeed, what we understand by freedom. The “concept of freedom and how it works at a societal level” sounds like Berlin’s idea of “positive” freedom to me – and that is a precursor to illiberal acts, totalitarianism and the arresting of four-year-olds for picking a couple of daffs.

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In which I find myself agreeing with Nick Clegg (except I don't believe him)

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In an interview with Henry Porter at The Observer, Nick Clegg - professional euro-crat turned Deputy Prime Minister said something I agree with:

"I need to say this – you shouldn't trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good."

Absolutely Mr Clegg, my sentiments entirely. So why is your "Protection of Freedoms Bill" so selective in the freedoms it wants to protect? And why don't I believe you when you make such an agreeable statement?

Is it because I watched your party colleagues calling for intrusive and draconian extensions to police power under the licensing act? Plus of course the Liberal Democrats illiberal and undemocratic support for minimum alcohol pricing! And should I mention the smoking ban - introduced on the back of bad science - that has further harmed our struggling pubs.

And why not restrictions on speed cameras, voyeuristic (and pretty useless) CCTV and the hounding of innocent motorists on the back of ANPR? Where is the removal of rights of entry to private property for public officials and the reform of family courts to stop the police seizing the children of innocents?

I could go on, Nick. I know you mean well. But these "Protection of Freedoms" come while your government extends restrictions and while your old pals in Brussels drift slowly towards a secret, unaccountable, almost fascistic superstate.

So Nick, I don't believe you.

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Further thoughts on Sheep - and what the clown says...

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The dear old Clown asks "What is wrong with people?"

He'll like this quote from de Tocqueville:

"It is vain to summon a people who have been rendered so dependent on the central power to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity."

...and I guess Fromm's take on all this is also relevent:

"Authority is not a quality one person "has," in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him."

We act as sheep because we desire to be sheep. Or not as the case may be?

And, if we stand alone? Proudly saying we won't flock? What happens? Ah, yes - that flock gets together attacks us, condemns us for difference. The flock may even break off from doing down another flock long enough to cast the lone ram out into the wilderness or worse still to pen that independent beast up safely away from any corruption that might come from actually thinking differently.

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