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I'm not blaming them for stuff Labour did, I'm blaming them for the stuff they did last time they were in power. The chipping away at civil liberties didn't start in 1997 you know; notably the Criminal Justic Act of 1994, which started the DNA-collecting bandwagon and effectively removed the right to silence, not to mention attempting to making raves illegal:

On balance I'd rather have my party cancelled than be locked up without trial then sent off to the US to be tortured.

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Not exactly the height of live-and-let-live liberalism, is it? Even if they didn't manage to get ID cards, Michael Howard and many conservatives argued for them (while Labour opposed them), and of course there was the infamous Section 28 - which David Davis supported, incidentally. Tories are not natural defenders of civil liberties.

Well, the Tories didn't bring in ID cards and Labour wanted to. Now the Tories are promising to abandon the project. Seems clear enough to me.

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Originally Posted by Zichao

On balance I'd rather have my party cancelled than be locked up without trial then sent off to the US to be tortured.

Ah, so now heavy handed statism is ok as long as it's not serious? Well then, no real harm done when photographers are stopped by police either, etc. etc.

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Well, the Tories didn't bring in ID cards and Labour wanted to. Now the Tories are promising to abandon the project. Seems clear enough to me.

Indeed, the Tories didn't dare to actually try it. Hence, Labour proposed it in the expectation that the Tories would support it; thus, both have been in favour of the idea when in power and both have opposed it in opposition.

Maybe they will shelve it; having the Lib Dems on board may act as a check on their authoritarian habits. But I don't think there is any reason to think the Tories are in some way innately opposed to the idea, or most of the rest of New Labour's extension of state power.

You can't get away from the fact that it was Labour that did all that stuff, and it's the Tories who are promising to undo it.

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And you can't get away from what the Tories have done in the past. I'm not attempting to excuse New Labour in any way.

It would be a good idea if the new government sets aside who did wrong and who was to blame, and just commits to a policy of materially freer civil liberties.

Both parties are doing it because, overall, people are fairly conservative when it comes to this stuff and only see it as "going too far" when it affects them...

For example, most people probably supported the curtailing of union power after the excesses of pre-Thatcherite England. And most people probably supported the interdiction of rave parties.

Besides which, liberalism usually value extremely highly individualism (of course) and the attending property rights. Thus, parties taking place illegally on other people's properties are likely to be suspicious for true libertarians as for the moral-majority brigade.

The schism between these two will be on different topics: Sexuality, deviancy, gay rights and free speech, for example.

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