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.