The bedraggled battle-standard of freedom

A nice article in the Times by Robbie Millen:

Alas, “South Park Republicanism” has few champions here in Britain. But there is a growing market for it. A younger generation of Britons — overtaxed, tolerant and modern — can smell the hypocrisy of political correctness. They have grasped that PC is just a job-creation scheme — do we need yet more diversity officers, counsellors, and vision co-ordinators? They know that the welfare state’s raison d’être is to ensure that “chavs” are supplied with Burberry caps and hooded tops. But the Tories are a shower. Boris Johnson, who has some satiric South Park qualities, was forced to apologise for having unvirtuous opinions. Oliver Letwin, the weedy Shadow Chancellor, believes there is something called the “moral case for low taxation” but he appears to have left it in the luggage rack on some train going nowhere. So Britain certainly needs to import a dose of hardcore liberty-loving. Just look at some news stories from the last few days, and you will see how bedraggled the battle-standard of freedom is.

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Three hundred years ago today, John Locke, that great exponent of true liberalism, died. Being a Godly chap, he would not have been a natural South Park fan, but he would have found it perplexing that Britons were so idle in the defence of their own freedoms, so keen to deny it to their fellow countrymen, so unwilling to see liberty flower in other parts of the world, and so willing to see the state devour so much of their income. But at least you are still free to ignore every word of the above.