Alan Rusbridger
Editor-in-Chief
Guardian News & Media

5-8 December 2008

Dear Mr Rusbridger

CP SCOTT'S GUARDS
Given the stated views of many of its editors and columnists, does the Guardian:

1. Recognise the fundamental importance of civil liberties to the health of the UK body politic?

2. Recognise that present UK legislation and practices are like so many coal-fired power stations polluting the political environment?

3. Agree that it has come to the crunch now, we are at the thick end of the wedge, there is no salami left to slice and the newspaper needs to conduct an energetic, concerted and vociferous campaign examining the civil liberties policies of each UK party, emphatically commending them where possible and denouncing them where necessary?

... and if not, why not?

Yours sincerely
David Moss

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Since 1 December 2008:

Marcel Berlins: If I were to look for evidence of our traditional liberties being diminished, it is there in abundance in the laws passed by parliament over the past few years.

Peter Norton-Taylor: Whisper it - democracy is at risk

Peter Preston: Why have we forgotten what freedom is?

Simon Jenkins: Barack Obama, who is pledged to close Guantánamo Bay, is being challenged to say what he will do with what the conservative Weekly Standard asserts are "250 participants in the most devastating terrorist attacks in history" from "an enemy unlike any other this nation has ever faced". Britons should not smile at this hyperbole*. The same madness afflicts Jacqui Smith's Home Office.

Afua Hirsch: How Labour abandoned human rights

Henry Porter: It is difficult to escape the conclusion that without political renewal we are lost as a free society.

Henry Porter: What we need now from this authoritarian home secretary is an undertaking that Britain's government will comply with the human rights legislation that her government points to whenever it is attacked for its erosion of liberty, rights and privacy.

Henry Porter: We should not forget that the slide in the quality of democracy and the erosion of liberty in Britain have been allowed to take place by MPs and many journalists who simply averted their gaze.

Jackie Ashley: We are at a dangerous time in the story of policing. Two things have come together to produce a toxic reaction. The so-called war on terror has produced near-hysteria about the need for stronger police powers. And at the same time, the police are being politicised in the wrong way - not by being required to respect the voice of parliament, but by being dragged into US-style media and political campaigning.

Marina Hyde: You may be on the point of spotting the irony in the very place that has systematically voted to strip the public of so many ancient rights and liberties suddenly becoming so keen to get the same people exercised about its own rights and liberties.

AC Grayling: Having an activist's interest in the increasingly serious civil liberties problems in contemporary Britain, my interest is practical as well as philosophical.