I think it's ironic that those who are in favour of personal liberties are often on the left of the political spectrum whereas, in this instance, it was the Tories who rolled back aspects of surveillance legislation that was introduced by Labour.
I think that the left/right distinction is silly myself.
You're right, it's totally ridiculous. The whole thing is rooted in shit that dates back to before the French Revolution[1], and there's no real connection whatsoever between the "left" and "right" of the French Assembly and modern political views.
How absurd is it? Just read this:
There is general consensus that the Left includes progressives, communists, social-liberals, greens, social-democrats, socialists, democratic-socialists, civil-libertarians (as in "social-libertarians"; not to be confused with the right's "economic-libertarians"), secularists, and anarchists, and that the Right includes conservatives, reactionaries, neoconservatives, capitalists, neoliberals, economic-libertarians (not to be confused with the left's "civil-libertarians"), social-authoritarians, monarchists, theocrats, nationalists, Nazis (including neo-Nazis) and fascists.
It takes anybody with even half a brain about .0002 seconds to realize that any sort of ontology that lumps "neoconservatives" and "economic libertarians" (which basically corresponds with "US style libertarianism") in the same bin, or that lumps "anarchists" with "democratic socialists", or that lumps pretty much any kind of "libertarian" along with "monarchists" and "theocrats", is totally useless.
In modern terms, there is no "right" and there is no "left". There are just people haphazardly throwing around archaic labels because they either A. have a vague notion that the label confers some sort of appealing "vibe" and want to leverage it to advance their cause, or B. have a vague notion that the label will be seen as a pejorative and want to use it to put their opposition in a bad light.
>> I think it's ironic that those who are in favour of personal liberties are often on the left of the political spectrum whereas, in this instance, it was the Tories who rolled back aspects of surveillance legislation that was introduced by Labour.
Those on what passes for the 'left' of UK politics spent over a decade stripping rights and liberties away just as far as they can in the name of protecting people.
I don't personally think it's much of a left-right issue. It's another axis.
Mean while, they Tories have rolled back legal aid, which means the poor cant get decent lawyers any more.
Non Brits might be amused to know that this Tory government wanted to out source poor people's legal representation to a haulage company. Yeah, you read that right.
I'm not the GP poster, but I'd suggest that one of the few policy areas the Tories and Lib Dems found that they could readily agree on was civil liberties.
One of the first things the new government did was start the wheels turning on what became the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012. Whether you think that law went far enough or not, I suspect most here would say it took steps in the right direction on numerous issues where the previous New Labour administration had eroded rights and liberties. A few of them were big-headline, fundamental issues, but there were quite a few relatively minor concerns addressed as well, such as the excessive use of surveillance by local authorities that we're talking about here.
Given that coalition government is not the norm in the UK, I suspect politically it was more important that this was something the two parties could agree on as an anchor than anything else, though no doubt many of the incoming Lib Dem MPs and at least some of the Tories were no fans of the previous situation anyway.
