John Jackson: Spring is here and the frogs in my garden pond are spawning. As I watch the randy little males croaking with excitement and clambering over each other to clasp the strangely passive females and let down their fertilising milt as they, the females, exude their transparent tapioca-like eggs, I [...]
Read →The Convention Blog
Carnival on Modern Liberty. 7
The latest and seventh edition of the Carnival on Modern Liberty is brought to you by Jonathon Calder’s Liberal England. The blog has a series of excellent links to pieces before, during and after the Convention – both on the day and more generally on liberty. It also discusses the Convention events outside of London, and [...]
Read →Human Rights and Global Responses
Evelyn Wong (The UCL Student Human Rights Programme)
Wars, climate change, the credit crunch and their fallout present a historic window of opportunity to raise the bar in human rights development. Equally, however, they present the danger of human rights being swamped by exaggerated and paranoid political rhetoric. It was thus with a mixture of hope and [...]
Labour and Lib Dems question Tory commitment to civil liberties
Sunday’s letter in the Observer questioning the Conservatives’ commitment to civil liberties, which was signed by several prominent Labour and Lib Dem participants in the Convention, had an additional paragraph which wasn’t published. Sunder Katwala (a signatory of the letter) has posted the full letter on the Fabian Society blog,including the additional paragraph that reads:
The [...]
Voices from the Crowd
Some of you have already seen our video ‘Voices from the Crowd‘. If you haven’t, please do! It is an impressionistic tour of the Convention – an attempt to capture the sights and sounds of the event. What we were most interested in was the public attending; a sort of counterweight to the speeches which [...]
Read →How liberal is Labour?
Inspired by the Convention on Modern Liberty, nextleft.org has been discussing the pertinent question: how liberal is Labour?
Ed Wallis feels that Gordon Brown missed a trick when he failed to follow through on his ‘on liberty’ speech and constitutional reform paper, but concludes that he “can’t see a meaningful – and successful – new agenda [...]
Jack Straw attacks the convention (again)
Matt Brian: The Secretary of State for Justice, Jack Straw, has continued his argument against the Convention and its supporters in his constituency blog. After initially issuing a response to the Convention in a piece in the Guardian on 27 Feb, Straw claims that the rise of the database state is actually providing people with [...]
Read →Liberty as a social value – Lessons from the Levellers
Melissa Lane, of King’s College Cambridge, has provided us with the notes to her talk for the session on Liberty, sovereignty and republicanism – Can the Leveller tradition be revived in the 21st century?
Melissa Lane: The panel has already brought to light many of the major themes connected with the Levellers: freedom of religion and [...]
The Convention can help make a breakthrough – Stuart Weir on What next?
We are publishing this article by Stuart Weir, which appears in the latest edition of Red Pepper, as a response to our discussion on What next?
Stuart Weir: Just being in the midst of the diverse crowds at the Convention on Modern Liberty was a thrilling experience in its own right, quite apart from the diversity and [...]
Questioning the Tory record on civil liberties
This letter appeared in today’s Observer:
The Convention on Modern Liberty last weekend that we attended and addressed was right to identify the threat to our civil liberties represented by the current levels of surveillance and collection of personal data, and we welcome the support of Conservative MPs Dominic Grieve and David Davis (“Liberty groups unite [...]
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