Illustration by Steve O'Brien

A MOB of Britain's finest eccentrics will gather in central London on February 28th. Their ranks will include outspoken novelists, radical lawyers and fed-up judges. David Davis, an unusual MP who left the shadow cabinet to wage guerrilla war from the backbenches, will be there; so will Shami Chakrabarti, the relentless head of Liberty, a pressure group. Several of those attending can sometimes seem pious; but in a stubborn, deeply English way, many are rather magnificent. The occasion is the “convention on modern liberty”, an event designed to rally opposition to the ongoing erosion of rights and freedoms in Britain (there will be similar meetings in other cities).

It might not seem the best moment for the ragtag gang to make its stand. The hour of the leviathan is nigh: the financial crisis has given the state permission to meddle in places that would once have seemed indecent. Economic “fairness” has eclipsed most talk of the judicial kind. Even in the fat times, often it was only the eccentrics who seemed to care about habeas corpus, due process or the use of anti-terrorist laws to quell hecklers at the Labour Party conference. Surely the slump is not the time to reclaim liberties that were casually cancelled during the boom?

Precedents in Britain and elsewhere do indeed suggest that freedom often contracts in line with GDP. People get angry. They misbehave: crime may rise, as a leaked Home Office memo predicted last year. They march, demonstrate and occasionally riot: newspapers this week reported lurid police warnings about a forthcoming “summer of rage”. They become more susceptible to extreme, xenophobic voices: there is widespread anxiety in British politics about a breakthrough by the loathsome British National Party at the European elections in June. Capturing a Euro-seat would represent a triumph for the far right greater than any achieved by Oswald Mosley and his blackshirts in the 1930s.

The big risk to civil rights could come in the way the government responds: in the methods it uses to contain the wrath, to cater to it and to distract the wrathful. It would, sadly, be unsurprising if ministers were to echo far-right rhetoric about immigrants instead of wholeheartedly repudiating it; they might tout even more inhumane policies towards asylum-seekers and terrorist suspects. Demos may be met with harsh counter-measures (Liberty was formed to protest against police treatment of the “hunger marchers” who came to London during the Depression).

Any such crackdowns will have to be orchestrated on a tight budget. But that might make them harsher: a home secretary who can't afford to recruit police officers might instead give the ones she does have yet more intrusive powers. As Mr Davis satirically puts it, “if you can't stop violent crime, at least make bloodcurdling noises about what you'll do to the few violent criminals you do manage to catch.”

Eternal vigilance

That is the gloomy prognosis for civil liberties in the lean years. Yet there is a rosier one. To begin with, even if penury encourages ministers to take shortcuts, a lack of cash for security projects will help. The technology of unfreedom is costly: number-plate recognition systems, identity cards and the government's assorted, panopticonic databases of DNA and other information are hugely expensive (always much more so than is at first estimated). They will be a much harder political sell when spending in other areas is being cut. Faith in such databases has anyway been undermined by civil servants' unfortunate habit of leaving discs and computers on trains, by the pool, etc.

That incompetence has contributed to a general loss of confidence in government. The campaigners' hope is that, as public disenchantment sharpens, it will take in a scepticism about over-mighty criminal-justice policy as well as about economic oversight. And the downturn, some say, may make liberty seem more precious rather than less. Two foreign holidays a year and the odd flat-screen television, the argument runs, may once have represented ample freedom for many. Britons may care more about, say, the abuse of surveillance powers by local councils when their bank accounts give them less freedom to shop and travel.

The hope, in other words, is that voters will prove able to think about more than one issue at a time. Conversely, the government may be too embroiled in the economic mess to waste time in Parliament and use up the ebbing goodwill of Labour MPs on illiberal measures. The abandonment, last autumn, of its bid to ram through an extension of pre-charge detention for terrorists could be a case in point. Gordon Brown himself has had a somewhat anguished relationship with such initiatives, seeking to justify them intellectually even as he exploits them politically. The recession offers ample cover for him to ditch some (ID cards, for example) without losing face.

As for the Tories, they are recent and wavering converts to the eccentrics' cause. Chris Grayling, the new shadow home secretary, has made manly noises about wanting “fewer rights, more wrongs”. Other leading Tories are privately more authoritarian than their party's officially liberal line. But they have made some commitments—to scrap ID cards, for example—that will be difficult to disavow, if and when they take office. The Liberal Democrats, who have assorted ideas for unwinding Labour's nastier inroads on liberty, should help to keep them honest.

The credit crunch has shaken the kaleidoscope of British politics. Banks have been nationalised; ridiculed leaders have been lionised, then ridiculed again. It will doubtless have further unpredictable side effects—including, maybe, a creeping victory for the eccentrics. Perhaps rights and liberty will remain a marginal concern, which few in a pinched Britain have the time or inclination to worry about; yet it may be the price of restricting freedom that proves too high for politicians. Liberty could turn out to be one of the few things that prosper in the slump.