Liberty remains as precious as ever | @guardianletters
 Britain in the 1930s was gripped by recession and unrest. In 1932, the "hunger marchers" headed for parliament with a one-million-strong petition. About 100,000 people gathered to meet them, but they were obstructed by thousands of police officers, including agents provocateurs masquerading as marchers and trying to incite violence. Journalist Ronald Kidd was in that crowd, witnessing the bloodshed first-hand. That's why, 80 years ago, on 22 February 1934, he and a handful of friends – HG Wells, AA Milne, Vera Brittain and Clement Atlee among them – formed the National Council for Civil Liberties, now known as Liberty. They vowed to protect not only the right to peaceful dissent but "the whole spirit of British freedom". Threats to freedom reappeared throughout the years. Each time, Liberty was on hand to hold the powerful to account. Its campaigns paved the way for a fairer mental health system, race relations, gay equality and human rights protections. ID cards were rejected and 42-day pre-charge detention defeated. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Today, Britain is again dealing with economic strife. Protesters take to the streets over legal aid cuts and against police violence. Undercover officers have infiltrated peaceful protest groups and even grieving families such as that of Doreen Lawrence. So Liberty, in its 80th year, is as important as ever, and resolves – with the help of its members – to continue to keep watch. For the fight for the liberties of the people, as Kidd recognised, is the fight that is never done. • David Hare (Where's the rage?, 22 February) is concerned about the "quietism" among citizens in response to over-reach by the security services. As he surely knows, the problem goes deeper. The Blair government eroded the freedoms of speech and of assembly, the right to a jury trial, and habeus corpus. It also sustained a change made by the Tories eroding the right to silence by persons being questioned by the police – which undermined the presumption of innocence. And yet, as John Kampfner recently noted, opinion polls have persuaded Miliband's Labour party that there is little to be gained by promising to restore these ancient rights. The bulldog breed has turned docile. • Thirty-three children have died in custody since 1999. Are we really being asked to believe that the Youth Justice Board is only now waking up to the fact that there is room for improvement in the way we lock up these vulnerable children and then subject them to bullying and restraining techniques, and allow some of them to die? The promised review, to be led by Lord Harris (Report, 7 February), is concerned only with the death in custody of 18- to 24-year-olds. The problem of the younger children is to be swept under the carpet yet again. What sort of a government deliberately neglects the welfare of children? • You devote three pages to the celebration of Liberty's work in promoting liberty and human rights over the past 80 (Review, 22 February) but sadly none of your contributors show any awareness that their emphasis on such concepts reflects and sustains the neoliberalism that so besmirches contemporary culture. I grew up in a South Wales valley community where civil rights were not on anyone's agenda in the 1930s; the concern then, as now, was for a democratic government to attend to the social injustices which prevailed. It is a long time since the historian RH Tawney warned that it is essentially the pike in the pond that benefit from freedom. theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds |
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