So Henry Porty at the Guardian’s Liberty Central Blog has decided to call it a day. The Government is ‘great’ on Civil Liberties so job done, right?

I wish I could be so sure. Labour’s totalitarianism was the force that created the Liberty Central blog, not to mention the rest of the pro-Liberty bloggers, pundits and writers. Labour’s power-grab caused a reaction, of which I know I’m a part. We organised and protested on the Internet and in the newspapers and at fancy speaking dinners, doing everything we could to influence the opinions of policy makers and regular voters.

And hey, in many ways it worked. Good for us. Rare common ground between the grassroots of the left, right and liberal leading to a good result. But what about the next front in the battle for liberty? It’s not enough for people to be politically and personally free. They have to be economically free, too. If you control a person’s money you control the person. The true power of our State lies here, and there’s no sign of The Coalition being willing to give that up.

Nope, the battle for real liberty has barely started. Our victory, if you can call it that, is that the very worst abuses of personal freedom by the last Government are going to be checked and rolled back. But the Digital Economy Act is staying on the statute books, we have no idea what’s going to be in the Freedom Bill… and there’s more than just a few weasel words and exceptions in what we’ve seen already that may blunt the knife The Coalition is using. We may, still, be disappointed.

Going further, the new front as far as Civil Liberties are concerned may turn out to be adapting to threats to our privacy not just from the State, but from abusive private sector organisations and web applications like Facebook. Facebook needs bringing down, I’ve no doubt about that. Not by the Government, but in the same way that MySpace and all the other old social networking sites fell – people just need somewhere better to go. The “punditariat” have a long way to go in educating and persuading that having photographs and personal details available for anyone to access on the internet is harmful, that such lack of privacy changes how people behave and removes an individual’s freedom from conformity. Facebook’s made it extremely difficult to secure your private data, and it’s alarming that people haven’t reacted more strongly to this.

Time to redouble efforts, not simply fade away regarding the job as done.

It occurs to me that while there’s been this lovely – and very welcome – support for Civil Liberties from The Coalition, there’s something we absolutely don’t know about yet.

Let’s face it, the images coming from Cameron and Clegg together are beautiful. They’re funny, relaxed and surprisingly open and honest. They benefit from the virtue of being squeaky clean and shiny, brand new.

But there’s another area of policy where many Tories and Lib Dems agree with each other (and disagree with Internet Libertarians like me), and that’s on State Puritanism. You know the kind of thing - punitive sin taxs on tobacco and alcohol and mutterings about price fixing and ‘nudging’. Crucially, there’s Drug Prohibition too.

Look at how the Lib Dem’s amnesty policy was dropped – the rationale for the Amnesty was that it’s impossible to find them (by the very nature of illegal immigrants existing below the State’s radar) and the only people who really benefit are the criminal gangs who exploit them. The argument against, ‘moral hazard’ or encouraging people to sneak into Britain in the hope of another Amnesty 10 years from now is the same logic that keeps Drug Prohibition in place – legalisation will encourage use and development of recreational drugs, and this would be worse (apparently) than allowing the continued engorgement of the pockets of the black market drugs industry.

The Lib Dems have no real power, or motivation, or desire – to do anything about this. While a battle against Labour’s worst authoritarian instincts appears to have been won, we can’t really be so certain the battle against mainstream politics’ desire to nanny us has seen any progress at all.

Yet this Coalition is going to enjoy a honeymoon period no matter what. To grumble now appears churlish and wilfully difficult… but perhaps, as bloggers, that’s what we’re for.

Watch this space…

It’s occured to me that this Government has already used Anti-Terror police to arrest and detain an Opposition MP in the pursuit of whistleblowers.

Now they have the formal, legal means to discover exactly who’s been sending emails to whom – assuming they can get a warrant. 

As an aside, this makes the BBC’s top technology story (which of course means no-one but nerds will ever see it), while the Italian quake disaster will be dominating the new agenda for the next week. 

Quote,

The plans were drawn up in the wake of the London bombings in 2005.

Brilliant. And there’s more:

Without communications data resolving crimes such as the Rhys Jones murder would be very difficult if not impossible.

Ah, it’s all the classics.

Meanwhile, the Social Democratic Paradise that is Sweden is ignoring this directive, and the Germans are going to fight it in the courts. Getting this one through the EU was a masterstroke, I must say. Apparently it was a ‘commercial’ matter rather than a ‘policing’ matter, so technically it didn’t require the vote to be unanimous in order to be mandatory for all EU countries. 

Brown, Chancellor of the World. Hmm. Can think of another famous Chancellor who wanted that title.