Cry freedom... now that Brown has given his permission

'OH LIBERTY, what crimes are committed in thy name!" exclaimed Madame Roland, addressing the clay statue of Liberty in the Place de la Révolution on her way to the guillotine. That destination had understandably disillusioned her with the French Revolution, which she, her husband and many thousands of other egomaniacs, bores, self-styled philosophers and constitution-mongers had so assiduously promoted.

The breed is with us still, the latest generation the offspring of the rebarbative Charter 88 or the even more nausea-inducing entity known as 'civic Scotland'. These meddlers flourished under the Blair régime, until events, dear boy, events preoccupied it with more serious issues. Now they have found an unlooked-for messiah: Gordon Brown. Last week he delivered a speech on Liberty. If one had been challenged to nominate the least likely topic to be addressed by Brown, this was surely it.

Here was an ideological reinvention: John Stuart Brown, apostle of liberty, come to free us from the fetters of state control, the hammer of repressive regulation and bureaucratic imposition. Clearly, there is no inversion of reality his acolytes will not attempt, to rehabilitate this doomed politician; the sheer audacity of packaging Gordon as the emancipator of the individual has a kind of glorious impudence. Lies do not come any bigger.

Brown on Liberty has all the persuasive resonance of Blair on Veracity. This speech was the latest of those crimes committed in the name of liberty that Madame Roland deplored. This was Gordon at his most pretentious and his most fraudulent. One of his commitments was "Respecting freedoms for our press, the removal of barriers to investigative journalism".

You would not think this was the same man who, after The Times had exposed his conference speech as plagiarised from Bill Clinton and Al Gore, courtesy of Bob Schrum their former speechwriter, telephoned that paper's editor four (by one account six) times on the same day. Liberty is all very well, but its most important expression is Gordon's freedom to control everything that moves.

His oration was wide-ranging, invoking Milton, Locke, Tocqueville, Macaulay, Orwell, Churchill, to name but a few. He even cited Bolingbroke, the 18th-century Tory leader (how many of Dave Cameron's beardless young modernisers have even heard of him?) and 'Land Of Hope And Glory', which Tories are now too coy to sing. Gordon was also inspired by Patrick Henry, a Founding Father of the United States, author of the soundbite "Give me liberty or give me death!" and slave owner. He disarmingly explained his penchant for purchasing African Americans: "I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living here without them."

The Founding Fathers were men after Gordon's own heart: prolific wordsmiths of the rhetoric of liberty and aficionados of bovine excreta, while maintaining an iron grip on their fellow human beings. The majority of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence were slave owners, seldom backward in applying the lash to Rastus if he got sassy, but with a command of the saccharine drivel of Rousseau that would have brought a tear to a glass eye. So it ever was with Whigs, liberals, reformers, progressives, revolutionaries - all the control freaks who have aspired to impose self-interested Utopian prescriptions upon stable, evolutionary societies.

Gordon's rhetoric remained faithful to the one consistent phobia of British society since 1530: "The flames of religious intolerance burned across this land too. But never so strongly as in continental (ie Papist) Europe." So do not look to Brown for amendment of the anti-Catholic provisions of the Act of Settlement, due shortly to claim a fourth living victim when the Queen's grandson, Peter Phillips, marries his Catholic fiancée.

Nor should we expect the cancellation of ID cards, the ultimate totem of the totalitarian state. Gordon insisted "we must respond to the need for a more secure way of establishing and protecting people's identity". Note the positive, caring tone of Big Brother. That is the kind of semantics by which the East German regime termed the Berlin Wall "The Great Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier".

Brown's whole social philosophy is Marxist, of the Frankfurt School. Hence his pretended concern that, in pursuing "essential policy objectives" like tackling "hate crime" (is there any love crime?), "we do not curb legitimate liberties to speak and be heard". The reassuring guarantor of free speech will be Jack Straw, who "will investigate the idea of a freedom of expression audit for future legislation"; and will then either reject it or embody it in one cosmetic, unenforceable clause that no court will uphold.

Brown does not seem to realise that the very concept of "hate crime", establishing discriminatory sentencing tariffs for offences against certain categories of people, has totally subverted that equality under the law that was painfully secured over the centuries, from Magna Carta to universal suffrage. The Home Office sentencing guidelines on "racially aggravated" crimes under the pre-devolution Crime and Disorder Act 1998 prescribe for common assault a maximum sentence of six months, but a maximum of two years if the offence was racially aggravated - quadruple the norm for assaulting a pensioner.

Jack Straw delivered his own lecture last week, expounding the advantages of a British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. Its intention is transparent: to promote even further the subsuming of British law into the European authoritarian apparat. We are far down the road to a written constitution which, in an ancient, evolved society such as ours, presages the reversal, not the reinforcement, of liberties.

Joseph de Maistre wrote of the 18th century, the era that, like Gordon Brown, gave credence to Locke and eventually spawned the French Revolution: "Perhaps the greatest folly of a century of follies was to believe that fundamental laws could be written a priori, whereas they are obviously the work of a power above men, and the very act of writing them down, later on, is the surest sign that their real force has gone." That is precisely the problem that is being manufactured by Brown and his vapid, deracinated constitution-mongering.