Taking Liberties Details

[Highly rated reviewer]

A film to make you thiink, perhaps angry.

This documentary film shows the wide ranging nature of the legislation passed in Britain over the last 10 years to restrict personal freedom, particularly the freedom to protest.

I feared it would be massively 'preachy' and so biased that any truth to its message was lost. However, overall I thought it carried things off really well. Perhaps because the application of the laws passed has been so extreme at times that they didn't have to look to hard for examples which made one's jaw drop open whilst thinking 'Is that really now illegal?' For instance, two harmless young people simply standing in the centre of London reading out the names of all of those killed in Iraq.

I do hope this gets a terrestrial tv airing as soon as possible.

Customer Review

This documentary has been attacked as one-sided and partisan. There is certainly no doubt that it passionately argues a case rather than presenting both sides of the argument without making judgement.

Yet it is difficult to see how any rational person without a vested interest could argue against the principal charge that our traditional rights and freedoms are under threat.

The scaffold on which are freedom is to be sacrificed is being erected plank by plank as this documentary details. First our right of protest is being restricted. New laws and worrying application of civil injunctions together with draconian actions and 'in-your face' surveillance by an increasing politicised police force.

Second, rights stemming from the Magna Carta are being removed. Detention without trial in our country in the form of tagging and house imprisonment and a blind-eye to US torture and detention in places like Guantanamo.

How do our leaders justify all this? They talk of public protection and defending democracy. The documentary, however, makes the case that we are not considerably safer but we are a lot less free as a result. One also is led to wonder if we would need all this 'protection' if we had a more reasonable and equitable approach to Muslim and Arab countries. Tony Blair knew that an occupation of Iraq would lead to an increase in terrorism. We have known for years that a slavish anti-Palestinian policy creates ill-will. Yet the same people who have created the problem now offer to protect us from the consequences - at a price!

This documentary holds your attention and serves to warn us all of the Police State that we may slide into. The most damning part of the documentary isn't the graphics, the interviewees or the commentary. It is the clips of Blair standing silent next to Bush as he lies about Guantanamo, the evasive performance of Jack Straw when questioned about torture and Blunkett in the Commons justifying his illiberal policies. It also shows ordinary folk exercising good sense and standing-up for their rights and those of their passive and silent fellow citizens. Far from being depressing it is inspiring - a clarion call to defend our hard-won rights.