Tom Wales introduces the society, in an article originally published in The Warwick Boar on the 23rd of June 2009

You may be excused for assuming that the pursuit of liberty is old hat.

Global intervention to save fal­ter­ing banks, mas­sive Gov­ern­ment debt and a na­tion­al ID card sys­tem cost­ing more than five bil­lion pounds all seem to sig­ni­fy a shift of power from peo­ple and busi­ness to Gov­ern­ment.Why should stu­dents seek to chal­lenge such paradigms? What is in it for us in our cosy lit­tle bub­ble of War­wick?

As stu­dents, we are af­fect­ed by the con­trol­ling grasp of Gov­ern­ment in many more ways than oth­ers. From next term, all in­ter­na­tion­al stu­dents will be forced to hold ID cards. On this issue, NUS Pres­i­dent Wes Street­ing hits the prover­bial nail on its head: “By sin­gling out in­ter­na­tion­al stu­dents from their peers with bio­met­ric iden­ti­ty cards, a group al­ready at risk of stig­ma­ti­sa­tion will be in­deli­bly marked as dif­fer­ent.”

The issue is even scari­er if we as­sume that Gor­don Brown gets his way and they start to roll out amongst the gen­er­al pub­lic from 2012. The im­pli­ca­tions of de­nial of rights to those who refuse to take them out and a na­tion­al ID reg­is­ter con­tain­ing fingerprint, bio­met­ric and over fifty other forms of personal in­for­ma­tion gives the power to Gov­ern­ment to fol­low every as­pect of our lives.

“Func­tion creep”, the in­evitable use of the sys­tem for more than just iden­ti­ty check­ing, and the de­mands of the se­cu­ri­ty ser­vices in the “War on Ter­ror” would no doubt en­cour­age any weak-​willed Gov­ern­ment to cur­tail the civil lib­er­ties of card-​car­ry­ing cit­i­zens even fur­ther. It is the start of a slip­pery slope for the fu­ture of Britain.

A poll last year by the Joseph Rown­tree Re­form Trust mea­sured that a ma­jor­i­ty of cit­i­zens are against the cards and a quar­ter strong­ly against them.

In ad­di­tion to this, mas­sive spend­ing and bor­row­ing under Gor­don Brown’s gov­ern­ment has par­tic­u­lar rel­e­vance to every stu­dent that wish­es to stay and work in the UK. We will be ser­vic­ing the debt for years to come, just as the gen­er­a­tions be­fore did so to pay for the Sec­ond World War.

Labour has amassed debts equal to £23,000 for each man, woman and child in the coun­try. Gov­ern­ment debt re­pay­ments alone equal the amount cur­rent­ly spent on the Po­lice Force. Whilst Labour and Con­ser­va­tives argue about how many pub­lic ser­vants have to be sacked in order to re­duce the bud­get deficit, bet­ter fi­nan­cial man­age­ment in the past means that we could af­ford to em­ploy even more if we so wished.

In order for this sit­u­a­tion to change we don’t just need a change be­tween the two par­ties in Gov­ern­ment, we need a greater cross-​par­ty clam­our for change. The for­ma­tion of a lib­er­tar­i­an so­ci­ety here at War­wick will give us the chance to broad­en our un­der­stand­ing of Gov­ern­ment and its many fail­ings.

In ad­di­tion to the ques­tions of civil lib­er­ties and mas­sive Gov­ern­ment spend­ing, lib­er­tar­i­an pol­i­tics ques­tion the very as­sump­tions that exist in so­ci­ety. Why should cer­tain drugs be con­trolled? Is in­ter­net pira­cy a bad thing? Should Gov­ern­ment be in­volved in cur­tail­ing pros­ti­tu­tion?

Con­se­quent­ly, in order to shape the fu­ture of British pol­i­tics we shouldn’t be scared to think out­side the box. Rather than act­ing as a fringe party, War­wick Lib­er­tar­i­ans will be open to mem­bers of all par­ties as well as peo­ple who hold just a pass­ing in­ter­est on the issue.

The root of the many branch­es of lib­er­tar­i­an­ism is a be­lief in free­dom. How­ev­er, as the ac­tions of Gov­ern­ment be­come more and more au­thor­i­tar­i­an that basis is be­com­ing in­creas­ing­ly frag­ile.

I hope you can join us in sup­port­ing that the metaphor­i­cal tree of lib­er­tar­i­an­ism, and hav­ing a damn good time in the pro­cess.