“When Home Office minister Fiona Mactaggart says that the rights of artists have to be set against the rights of communities to be secure and safe, she trivialises and marginalises activities that are central to how we are.” (David Edgar, in the Grauniad)

And that is the Blair line on “freedom” in a nutshell: positive freedoms are mutually limiting. Whenever they wish to abrogate some negative freedom (e.g. freedom from prior restraint on publishing or “artistic expression”), this is the line they will use: your freedom to speak must be balanced against so-and-so’s freedom “to be secure and safe”.

One wonders whether they have been studying the Dworkin/MacKinnon anti-pornography ordinances, which fairly similarly argue for a mutually limiting relationship between competing freedoms of expression. The argument there is that porn defines its objects’ sexuality for them, effectively abrogating their freedom of sexual self-determination; and, in further defining that sexuality in terms of passive absorption of sexual violence, also abrogates their freedom to live, form sexual relationships with others, walk the streets etc. without being threatened by the ambient menace of male violence.

Well, I’m not wholly out of sympathy with this, although I tend to think that the diagnosis of the causes of the ambient menace of male violence is a bit iffy - nobody very much is making porn about the likes of me (qua generic pasty-faced male geek), but I don’t make a habit of wandering around on my own late at night for fairly similar reasons to those that keep a lot of women indoors. But that’s by-the-by.

The defining feature of this sort of legislation is its emphasis on the preservation of bare life as over-riding every other kind of positive freedom - they’re not really seeking a “balance”, so much as an all-purpose trump card. The analysis given by the blog Against The War On Terror seems broadly correct to me. It’s politics-of-fear stuff; and if you look at who and what we’re supposed to be afraid of, it’s evidently a racist, repressive and reactionary politics to boot.

The virtue of “negative” freedoms such as freedom-of-the-press is that they effectively suspend judgment about what the “balance” of positive freedoms should be. “Liberal” politics is structured throughout by this suspension, which applies first and foremost in economic life (“free trade”, etc., requiring the suspension of any judgment about economic inequalities). The argument (from Acton, Hayek, Popper et al) is that there’s simply no-one entitled or qualified to judge: better to let things take their course. The “arrogance” of Blair’s government consists in their willingness to posit themselves as a competant authority in matters in which liberalism asserts that there can be no competant authority. But not in economic matters - they’ll ban hunting and smoking, suspend habeas corpus on a whim, bang you up for singing an old Christy Moore tune about Bobby Sands; but heaven forbid they should ever be accused of tinkering with the pristine mechanism of the Market.