Taking Liberties [2007] [DVD]

I saw this at the cinema and would urge all who value such rights as freedom of speech, habeus corpus, right to protest and privacy as fundamentals of British society to watch this film. Director Chris Atkins reveals how laws passed in recent years have eroded these and other rights, through the use of animation, personal testimonies and some informed commentary.
In spite of the subject matter, the film does not drag and entertains. And it is both reassuring and amusing to see the very ordinary, yet very special heroes in this film, standing up for our rights in the most British of ways. They are brave folk, but do nothing that the rest of us couldn't do too, if we could only get off our backsides..
This film will make you angry, sad, frustrated, and probably shock you - it means to. Its aim is to wake us all up, before it is too late, and all our liberties have been taken away.
Buy it, watch it, inflict in on all who know you - and then get them to do the same!
Incidentally, the excellent soundtrack is available on cd and a percentage goes to Amnesty.

An interesting book whose premise is that Democracy is something that your children will read about in a book (if they're allowed to) and by the end of it, you may be inclined to agree.
Successive Labour party apparatchiks are squandering 800 years of hard won rights for the common man and want you to lay down your freedoms for your lives where past generations laid down their lives for your freedoms. As Benjamin Franklin said "those who give up their Liberty for temporary security, deserve neither". Those liberties survived the Second World War, the Cold War and thirty years of IRA terrorism, but are under sustained assault epitomised by a quote from Tony Blair (a lawyer) boasting that civil liberties were made for another age and who feels that you can give up your freedoms to somehow become more free.
The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, for example, blurs the distinction between what is wrong and what is illegal, giving the police a broad raft of powers, which if improperly applied may not amount to living in a police state, but certainly lays the foundation for one, allowing the people to be punished before the courts have decided what laws have been broken (i.e. being handed over to another state's jurisdiction without due evidence of a crime being committed). The drive to change the relationship between the State, its servants and the people can be best summed up by a quote by Thomas Jefferson, " when the people fear the government, there is tyranny, when the government fears the people there is liberty." That they must fear us and desire to control us is the persuasive message this book sends out.
One is reminded of the climax of Animal Farm as much as of 1984. Having done everything that is asked of them, the animals are found peering in through the window and realising that they have been betrayed by those who promised to safeguard their liberty.
Is the future Stasi Britain (only more inept when it comes to safeguarding the data filched from its citizens)? You decide. After all, Democracy is more than just casting your vote every few years

Peter Bradshaw
Friday June 8, 2007
The Guardian

It may not tell us much that's new, but there's something exhilarating about this thoroughly enjoyable and worthwhile docu-blast against Tony Blair's insidious diminution of native British liberties. Director Chris Atkins shows how, since 1997, New Labour's residual passion for ideology, combined with a fear of looking Spartist or soft on terror, has combined to deliver a panic-stricken abandonment of liberties that we'd somehow held on to in the face of Nazi Germany and the IRA.

Article continues

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Some pundits may find it deficient in sophistication or the fence-sitting neutrality of good taste; for me it was a vitamin-boost of scepticism. Cheerful, polemical and tactless, Atkins's film raises a celebratory glass to the spirit of British awkwardness and bloody-mindedness, the dissident spirit that infuses both the anti-war protesters and the Countryside Alliance - Mark Thomas and Boris Johnson alike. "What about Magna Carta?" demands Tony Hancock in a nicely chosen clip. "Did she die in vain?" In the strangest way, Hancock is the tutelary deity behind many of the English protesters here: very often elderly and apolitical souls who feel they have earned the right not to be bullied by the macho-menopausal apparatchiks of the Blair/Brown succession.
It is an old story. Mr Blair was once ferociously against ID cards, and now he loves them. He once regaled audiences with anecdotes, combined with bittersweet shrugs, to the effect that protesters yelled nasty things at him as he was driven into Westminster in his official car, but gosh, how wonderful to live in a country where folk are free to shout nasty things. Now he feels he can and will live without these protesters. He is an enthusiast for increasing detention without charge, for the vast internment camp at Guantánamo Bay. And this trained barrister is not straining his forensic and analytic abilities to investigate the mounting circumstantial evidence that extraordinary rendition flights are stopping off at Manchester and Prestwick.

September 11 was the key event - and yet the Anglo-American crackdown on radical Islamic terrorism is, in the oddest way, not the most powerful moment in the movie. That honour goes to the case of the NatWest Three: three British bankers accused of white-collar fraud by the American authorities and extradited there with no evidence presented to the British CPS. Our submission to US rule on 9/11 issues simply encouraged America to believe that its writ extends beyond its borders on any and every other issue.

Atkins captures pungent moments of low comedy. A police-protected bailiff is captured thrusting court orders at protesters with a jolly cry of "Served!" Later, a protester is shown trying to turn the tables, stuffing a revised court order into the hands of a policeman who is humiliated and angered beyond any rational measure by this casting-the-runes manoeuvre. He insists the man take the document back and threatens to nick him for littering.

It all makes for a shabby and abject story, a paradoxical tale of weakness from a political generation from which 10 years ago we expected such strength and self-belief. They are still in deep denial; we are waking up.