The Assault on Liberty: What Went Wrong with Rights

An urgent and necessary polemic on the government’s assault on our fundamental freedoms and the proliferation of Human Rights.

From 42 days detention to ASBOs, as citizens of modern Britain we are seeing some of our fundamental freedoms being pawned off cheaply in the name of security. At the same time, a whole range of novel, and comparatively trivial, rights are being handed out like sweets. Why? In the last 10 years the government has launched an unprecedented assault on our civil liberties. The loss of basic liberties has been replaced by a litany of new rights and the emergence of a new rights culture without any meaningful democratic oversight. This assault, and the parallel proliferation of rights, has warped the moral compass that guided the idea of fundamental rights throughout British history. But in whose name and to what end? In The Assault on Liberty, a radical polemic on the state of the nation, Dominic Raab, Chief of Staff to the Shadow Home Secretary, asks whether we can really defend our freedom by sacrificing it. The risks to Britain are real and likely to grow unless unchecked. Raab argues that the long-term risk is that the current approach will undermine the credibility of, and public support for, the very idea of fundamental rights in this country. He concludes that it is only a modern Bill of Rights that would offer a precious opportunity to review and repair our approach to rights, one of the pillars of our liberal democracy and would place these fundamental liberties in the correct context of the challenges facing Britain and its citizens in the 21st century.