Chris Huhne MP, Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary

In the last twenty years we have witnessed the steady erosion of civil liberties in Britain. One by one, our once treasured freedoms have been stripped away. A country that once prided itself on being free is now undermining the most basic rights of its citizens. The state has triumphed over the individual with scant regard for privacy and liberty. In an effort to look tough, successive authoritarian Labour and Conservative Governments have passed laws that are turning the UK into an oppressive, surveillance state.

The Liberal Democrats are determined to resist the slow death by a thousand cuts of our hard-won British liberties. Some of the changes detailed here may seem small in themselves but taken together they cumulate to a colossal loss of personal freedom in less than two decades. George Orwell’s 1984 was a warning, not a blueprint. Yet the Big Brother society is growing. Our forebears who fought so hard for the rights we have had stripped away would be shocked at what we’ve lost.

That is why we have published our Freedom Bill, detailing how we intend to roll back the draconian laws passed by successive Labour and Conservative administrations. This draft Bill is the first time a major political party has brought all of the laws which have undermined civil liberties together in one piece of legislation so that they can be easily repealed. We have called it the Freedom Bill because if the measures within it were all repealed it would represent the greatest victory for freedom in Britain in the last twenty years.

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all the freedoms that have been lost in recent years. Sadly, there are too many. It is intended to be a starting point – to show people how much personal liberty has been stripped away by this Government and the one before it. The Freedom Bill and the corresponding website is a consultative document. We want to hear from you. What have we missed? What have we got wrong? What do you disagree with? Where should we have gone further? Which do you think are the most important rights to restore? What else would you like to see on the website? We hope that this is the start of the journey towards a freer Britain. Labour and the Tories won’t take you there. It’s up to us.

Our first draft of the Freedom Bill contains twenty measures to restore the fundamental rights that have been stripped away in recent years. We would:

• Scrap ID cards for everyone, including foreign nationals.
• Ensure that there are no restrictions in the right to trial by jury for serious offences including fraud.
• Restore the right to protest in Parliament Square, at the heart of our democracy.
• Abolish the flawed control orders regime.
• Renegotiate the unfair extradition treaty with the United States.
• Restore the right to public assembly for more than two people.
• Scrap the ContactPoint database of all children in Britain.
• Strengthen freedom of information by giving greater powers to the Information Commissioner and reducing exemptions.
• Stop criminalising trespass.
• Restore the public interest defence for whistleblowers.
• Prevent allegations of ‘bad character’ from being used in court.
• Restore the right to silence when accused in court.
• Prevent bailiffs from using force.
• Restrict the use of surveillance powers to the investigation of serious crimes and stop councils snooping.
• Restore the principle of double jeopardy in UK law.
• Remove innocent people from the DNA database.
• Reduce the maximum period of pre-charge detention to 14 days.
• Scrap the ministerial veto which allowed the Government to block the release of Cabinet minutes relating to the Iraq war.
• Require explicit parental consent for biometric information to be taken from children.
• Regulate CCTV following a Royal Commission on cameras.

Chris Huhne MP, Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary.