Forget Bond – the UK is lax on everything but our security

The latest Bond film fires dud lines at you for 148 minutes you will never get back, but one really slices through. C, Spectre's pantomime villain, who all but twirls his moustache as head of British intelligence, despairs of faint hearts who resist his quest for blanket surveillance. "And all in the name of democracy," he jeers, slowing to savour the profundity of his next three words. "Whatever that is."

Leave aside the undergraduate wit, what jars is the scriptwriters’ attempt to pander to paranoia about out-of-control spooks while hopelessly misjudging its extent. According to most survey evidence, democracy would give C little trouble.

The demos is not liberal. Britons wanted 90-day detention without charge even as MPs voted it down 10 years ago, defeating Tony Blair for the first time as prime minister. They wanted the "snooper's charter" Theresa May is trying to steer through parliament in revised form, starting this week. In a YouGov poll in January, 63 per cent of respondents trusted intelligence agencies to "behave responsibly" with the surveillance measures in the home secretary's Investigatory Powers Bill. Britain seems relaxed about the deep state, not just the state.

Unanimously wrong

None of this means voters are right or governments should defer to their instincts. The public can be unanimously wrong. But the views allow one conclusion. Judged by the depth of its imprint on popular sentiment, civil libertarianism is an almost uniquely unsuccessful political movement.

Only campaigners for a British republic have had less purchase on the national mood over the decades, and they have the excuse of not really bothering. The jurists, celebrities and campaigners who make up the liberal lobby do exert themselves. They can coin a pejorative like “snooper’s charter” and make it stick in columns such as this. There is always a didactic film or play showing. But they never move beyond the curation of elite discourse. They have shaped media norms so that no broadcast interviewer ever asks a home secretary – given what we know about public attitudes – why she is not seeking even more powers for the security state (just as no politician is asked why his latest cut to public spending does not go much deeper).

It is the average Briton they have failed to move. When parliament stymied Blair, it became modish to hail Liberty, the liberal pressure group, as the best campaigners in the land. But they lost the argument in the country. A nation of dazzling laxity on race, sex, God and so much else remained conservative on crime and security.

Libertarians are culpable for some of this. Their bludgeoning hyperbole – government measures are Kafkaesque, every home secretary is draconian – is easy to dismiss. If they acknowledge a trade-off between freedom and safety, it is with a mealy mouth and an emotional tin ear. And they speak in a blur of abstract values to citizens who think in practical terms: it is no accident the least popular, now forsworn, bit of May’s plans is the banning of encryption software, which might imperil online financial transactions. Invoking “our liberties”, as if any normal person uses that possessive phrase, carries fewer people than itemising the tangible losses they stand to incur from heavy-handed government.

If civil libertarians need a consoling thought, here is one. Aside from the stylistic tweaks just mentioned – the equivalent of revising a lousy film script – there is not much more they can do. Voters are relaxed about the security services for reasons ingrained in their country's history. The British mainland is not scarred by experience of a police state in the way parts of continental Europe are. (Northern Ireland is another matter.)

Converting Britons to liberalism is no less a fool’s errand than making them fervent Europeans. If independent nationhood has always worked for a country, supranational government will seem otiose. If the security state has not seriously menaced its life, libertarianism will smell like an answer to a question nobody asked.

The most British thing about James Bond is the very idea of a secret agent of the state who is benign. Such a character is trickier to concoct in the German, or even French or Italian, context. Britain’s civil libertarians do important work in the wrong country. © The Financial Times Limited 2015