One can, in principle, respect the fact that different political cultures march at different speeds to different drums. But it is not possible, in practice, to respect the general timidity of the British political response to the Guardian's revelations about the operations of America's NSA and Britain's GCHQ. While President Barack Obama reacted to the revelations by setting up a commission to examine the issues – their report went to the White House a month ago and the president's response is expected soon – the British government has responded by doing little except denounce the messengers for bringing embarrassing news. While the US Congress has worked on three separate bipartisan bills aimed at reforming the scope and behaviour of the NSA, the British parliament has debated no reform bills whatever.

Now, though, there are the first stirrings of the kind of response which British citizens are fully entitled to expect from their politicians when confronted with Edward Snowden's important revelations. Two senior Liberal Democrats, the current party president Tim Farron MP and his backbench colleague Julian Huppert, are to propose a detailed motion on digital rights to the party's spring conference in March. The motion, which seems likely to be carried, calls for judicial oversight of state surveillance and regular releases of statistics on UK security service data requests. The MPs want an Obama-style commission to look at all the issues in the UK, including the strengthening of parliamentary and judicial oversight of the security services and digital rights.

It would be understandable if the initial reaction is that this is all too little and too late. On one level that is true. But it is also definitely much better than any other mainstream British political response to the Snowden documents, partly because it is considered and overarching. The Lib Dem initiative also has three other potential strengths. First, it strengthens pressure on Lib Dem ministers to press for a rounded and liberties-based UK coalition response to Mr Obama's imminent announcements. Second, it offers a non-partisan basis on which front and backbench MPs – Labour, Conservative and others – can come together to press for reform. Third, it assertively puts human rights and civil liberties back on the agenda of UK politics after a period in which some Conservative ministers, including the justice secretary and the home secretary, have cavalierly pandered to Ukip and the rightwing press over these principles.

For all these reasons, those who are rightly alarmed at what the NSA and GCHQ are doing can take heart from the Lib Dems' move. They speak for many millions of people. The rest of the political establishment needs to match them. Even in timid, tremulous and uptight Britain, such pressure can make a difference.