Strange beasts, these ‘libertarians’ who love to curb the freedom of others / by Kenan Malik

When is a #libertarian not a libertarian? When, apparently, it is the wrong kind of people whose liberties are being curtailed. The past week has seen so-called “libertarian” Tory MPs rebel against the government’s Covid plan B – the necessity for #vaccine certificates or negative tests to attend large venues, mandatory #vaccinations for NHS staff, and the compulsory wearing of masks in certain spaces. “We’re not a ‘papers please’ society,” Tory MP Marcus Fysh claimed. “This is not Nazi Germany.”

Forget the gratuitous Nazi analogy, for which Fysh apologised; such a stance is now endemic in much discussion of Covid restrictions. The fact is, for many people, Britain is very much a “papers please” society. “Papers please” is what the “hostile environment” for immigrants is built on – the demand that people who might be immigrants must show their papers before they can receive hospital treatment, rent a flat or find a job. It’s what lies at the heart of the Windrush scandal – the insistence that those who did not have the right papers could not be British, even if they had been born here, and had lived and worked here all their lives.

The failure to recognise this is not an unfortunate oversight. Rightwing libertarians often have a selective view of who should be able to avail themselves of liberty. In the run-up to the debate over Covid restrictions, two other laws deserving of their attention passed through parliament. The libertarians’ response to both revealed their authoritarian core.

The government’s police, crime, sentencing and courts bill is currently in its committee stage in the Lords, having travelled through the Commons. At its heart is an assault on the ability of people to protest. The law would allow police to prevent demonstrations they deem too noisy or causing “serious disruption”. What “serious disruption” means is left to the home secretary to define.

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It was historically the left that waved the banner of #liberty, seeking to expand its meaning and to include debarred groups, from the working class to women to colonial subjects. These struggles gave shape to the modern meaning of liberty. More recently, though, many sections of the left have retreated from issues that once helped define it, from free speech to civil liberties. This has given a free pass to the libertarian right both to don the mantle of freedom and to distort its meaning; “libertarians” who are happy to deny basic #freedoms to those who need it most. Liberty is too important to leave to those who don’t really believe in it.

#uk