Freedom revisited: perhaps we need a new revelation
by Archbishop Cranmer:
“If Boris Johnson has a political philosophy it is that he will not restrict our liberties unless there is an overwhelming reason to do so”, tweeted BBC’s Robert Peston after the Prime Minister’s interview with Andrew Marr on Sunday morning. This isn’t a philosophy, of course; it’s a nebulous policy. The “overwhelming reason” to restrict people’s freedom is the appeal of despots throughout history.
“There are obviously a range of tougher measures that we would have to consider,” the Prime Minister explained. “I’m not going to speculate now about what they would be,” he unhelpfully didn’t explain, “but I’m sure that all our viewers and all our listeners will understand what the sort of things…”
It isn’t clear at all that people do understand the sort of things the Government intends to do to restrict our freedom beyond what ‘Tier 4’ lockdown already prohibits. Confine to homes? 6.00pm Curfew? Summary imprisonment for breaching the rules? Ceasing all public worship (again)?
Freedom has to be cherished: it is very hard-won, and so easily lost. As Theresa May observed in Parliament a few weeks ago: “I just want to make one word about public worship and echo the concerns of others. My concern is that the Government today, making it illegal to conduct an act of public worship for the best of intentions, sets a precedent that could be misused for a government in the future with the worst of intentions, and it has unintended consequences.”
It absolutely does, not least because people seem to be forgetting the meaning of freedom possibly because they never understood the philosophy in the first place. Indeed, policy seems to have supplanted philosophy even in the minds of journalists like Robert Peston, who are supposed to interrogate political consistency, motive and cause.
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