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FREEDOM: AN EDITOR'S OPINION

CHARLES MOORE | September 5th 2008 Nic's event's/flickr A former editor of the Daily Telegraph praises the overthrow of trade unions, the greatest emancipation of his working life...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Autumn 2008

Intelligent Life asked 11 eminent people from different walks of life to look back over their adult lifetime and name the freedom we have gained and lost that means the most to them. They were free to take freedom in any sense, political or cultural, social or technological. What mattered was that it mattered to them.

THE FORMER EDITOR: CHARLES MOORE

Aged 51, columnist on and former editor of the Daily Telegraph, now writing the authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher

FREEDOM LOST:

Until 2005, I could hunt live quarry with hounds. Like many of the more obviously important freedoms, this one had always existed: no one had to write it down. Then the government banned it. It followed classic anti-freedom logic--we dislike something, therefore it must be banned. Because its dislike was so strong, it deliberately ignored evidence, even the evidence it had itself commissioned. Hunting sounds like a small thing, but, like most freedoms, it turns out to contain other virtues--the good management of land, the handing on and development of skills, especially in relation to animals, the formation of non-profit, small-scale social groups, comradeship, physical fitness, risk, the combination of sport and utility (pest control), the mixing of young and old. The ban was a malicious attack on an entire way of life. The only good thing about it is that it doesn’t work.

FREEDOM GAINED:

When I first became a newspaper journalist in 1979, I had, in theory, to be a member of a trade union. Somehow, through a sort of back door, I avoided this, but the rule of the unions, through immunities and the closed shop, was astonishing--even more so for the printers than for the journalists. This semi-monopoly held back enterprise, opportunity, variety, profit and quality. It also became more and more political: the printers had to down tools if the union did not like something the paper was saying. It was demoralising, because every day one went into a workplace that manifestly was not working properly. The overthrow of this nonsense, throughout industry, in the 1980s was so complete that it is hard to remember now, but it has been perhaps the greatest emancipation in my working life. And it has confirmed my belief that true freedom is an opportunity permitted, or a restriction removed, rather than a “human right” bestowed by a government that thinks it knows best.

Up next: the freedoms gained and lost by the economics writer Noreena Hertz, author of "The Silent Takeover" and “The Debt Threat” and visiting professor at the Rotterdam School of Management

See also: Richard Dawkins, Shami Chakrabarti, Neal Ascherson.

Co-ordinated by Horatia Lawson