JOHN HUMPHRYS: Freedom Day? We’ve become willing slaves 

The sun was shining and the Thames was at its most beautiful as I leaned against the wall. Then the man in the hi-vis vest appeared.

‘You can’t stand there,’ he barked.

‘Why not?’

‘It’s the Covid rules.’

I pointed out that there was no one within 20 yards and I couldn’t possibly be putting anyone at risk. So I stayed put and he went away looking cross.

When my partner arrived with some tea we sat on the grass to drink it. Again no one near us. The man came back with his boss and one other ‘marshal’. We had to move. Again I said no. Not until we’d finished our tea.

They gave up in the end. But that was before ‘they’ had real powers to stop us doing harmless things. It was 17 months ago and I remember thinking: the Government’s got a fight on its hands if it thinks the British people will allow themselves to be bullied by jobsworths for daring to exercise their harmless freedoms.

How wrong can you be? And I wasn’t alone. Boris Johnson apparently thought much the same.

One of the reported reasons that he delayed the first lockdown — at great cost in lost lives — was that he wanted it to coincide with the peak of infections. He was convinced that the British people would not tolerate serious restrictions for more than six weeks.

How wrong could he be?

On Monday we shall be celebrating Freedom Day. It’s not exactly our first. The one in June got postponed to July, which then turned out to deliver rather less than the freedom promised. Monday, I fear, will be much the same. And there’s already talk of new restrictions in the autumn.

Vaccination passports anyone?

Johnson had always enjoyed his reputation as a bit of a rebel who broke the rules and laughed in the face of bureaucracy. Good old buccaneering Boris: the leader who really did believe that our national character is defined by our love of freedom.

But is it? For a nation that reveres liberty, we have been remarkably relaxed at surrendering it. And even gone beyond what’s demanded of us.

In the past 17 months a scary number of us have seemed happy to adopt the role of coppers’ nark. Anxious to dob in the lonely neighbour who breaks the rule by having a friend in for tea when the rule says no. Or nod approvingly when some police have done what many will always do given half a chance — exceed their authority.

Where was the public outrage when the boys in blue checked the bags of shoppers who might have bought an unauthorised Easter egg? Or used a drone to spy on an elderly couple walking their dog on a deserted hillside. Or arrested a couple of friends having cups of tea in a quiet beauty spot.

Did the polls show a decline in support for the measures? They showed the opposite. We wanted them to be even stricter.

In every democratic country there’s a spectrum with freedom at one end and order and security at the other.

Our friends in France favour freedom over order. In the distant past it led to the guillotines. Today it’s the gilets jaunes blocking roads or forcing hapless ministers to rip up their policies and start again. The rulers fear the ruled.

The Germans favour order and stability over freedom. When Angela Merkel packs it in next month, she’ll have run Germany for 16 years. Unthinkable in most other democratic countries.

It’s not that the French don’t like order or the Germans dislike freedom. It’s the relative importance they attach to each.

America is famously the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’. Brave? Often crazy.

We look at the immensely powerful gun lobby that resists serious gun controls and shake our heads in disbelief. The tragedy of the shootings in Plymouth this week that have shocked the nation would have been unremarkable in America. Almost a weekly event. The so-called right to bear arms comes at a terrible price.

A t the opposite end of the freedom spectrum is a country with no such problem: China.

We look at the absolute control exercised by the Chinese Communist Party and suppose the ordinary people must be straining at their chains desperate to be free. They look at the massive increase in their prosperity and their nation’s ever increasing power on the world stage and thank their leaders. Who needs ‘freedom’ when there’s food on the table?

So where does Britain stand on the spectrum? We like to believe we are at the freedom end of things. It fits in with the story we tell ourselves. Churchill used it to devastating effect between June 1940 and June 1941 when we stood alone against the Nazi threat — and thank God he did.

Public opinion was actually ready to do a deal with Hitler, to settle for peace and order. The War Cabinet was divided. But those mighty speeches telling us that we would fight on the beaches because we were the indomitable defenders of freedom won us over. It remains the national myth.

Ours is a freedom of speech, freedom from arbitrary oppression because of the rule of law, freedom to choose our rulers. The Brexit campaign’s ‘Take back control’ slogan worked for so many because it meant freedom.

But it’s dangerous to take it for granted. The great French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville famously predicted back in the 1830s that freedom would eventually be strangled by an ever-tightening net of petty rules. Each might well be brought in for the best of reasons, but the cumulative effect would be increasing order over diminishing freedom.

Take something as seemingly trivial as road signs. They are now becoming so complicated in our big towns and cities that they’ll have to lower the speed limit to 5 mph so drivers can read all the stuff. That’s assuming we’re actually allowed to drive.

Low traffic neighbourhoods are springing up everywhere. Great for those who live in leafy enclaves. Not so good for poorer people who can’t drive down their own streets any longer. And most weren’t consulted. Another freedom eroded.

But the protests will die out. They usually do.

We made a bit of a fuss when CCTV cameras started popping up everywhere but when we were told they were for our own safety we calmed down. Now there are nearly six million. One for every 13 citizens. And stand by for facial recognition cameras. They’re on their way.

If you don’t want to be snapped, stay at home and read a book. But make sure it’s approved by the nation’s self-appointed censors.

The Power And The Glory by Graham Greene is one of the greatest novels of the last century. But it’s only a matter of time before the woke warriors spot that a principle character is described as ‘half-caste’. Watch this space.

Publishers are terrified of the new censors, which means few authors will risk writing anything that might cause offence. That’s the beginning of the end of free speech.

No author has delivered a more powerful warning about it than George Orwell. Indeed, his statue stands outside the BBC in London. His writing should be on the desk of all those bosses inside who are terrified of the woke mob.

Free speech is the key test of our supposed love of freedom and there are people who claim it must be curbed. Some are so convinced they don’t want us even to have an argument about it. ‘Safe spaces’ trump freedom in their book.

But let’s enjoy our new freedom from Monday. And let’s hope that it lasts. And let’s make a fuss if it doesn’t.