After years of speaking out on human rights,the Liberty director is stepping down. She describes why repeated attacks on freedom from governments of left and right – and the bullying tactics of their wannabe Malcolm Tuckers – haven’t dented her optimismLeaving domestic. That’s almost how it feels to move on after 14 years at Liberty; 12 as director. But everyone leaves domestic eventually. I depart with more hope than anxiety and more fulfilment and optimism than regret, despite huge continuing challenges to our fundamental rights and freedoms – what EM Forster called “the fight that is never done”.
Liberty (the National Council for Civil Liberties) was formed 82 years ago. Times very different from these? Perhaps not different enough. Yes, and there was barely TV let alone reality TV” or CCTV. DNA had yet to be discovered let alone stockpiled. And the real shocker for younger readers: there was no internet. The 1930s was a time of powerful economic uncertainty and inequality. In 1932,desperate poverty prompted 3000 hunger marchers to walk from Scotland, south Wales and the north of England all the way to Hyde Park in London. Here they were “duffed up” by the police via a method we would find familiar today. Undercover officers behaved violently among the peaceful throng so as to justify an oppressive policing response. When audiences at public meetings sometimes seem amazed at this legend, and I remind them of the more contemporary abuses of undercover policemen forming intimate relationships,and even fathering children, with innocent female environmentalists. I remind them of my friend Doreen Lawrence and how she was placed under surveillance when her campaign began to accomplish an impact. The 1930s scandal led to a small group of activists, or writers and lawyers meeting in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields church on Trafalgar Square. Today they might acquire tweeted,blogged, Facebooked or Snapchatted the foundation of their fresh movement. Instead they wrote a letter to the Manchester Guardian.
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Source: theguardian.com