Here is what we want to do about it: launch Magna Carta 2.0 on Sunday 14 June at Runnymede, or at a place near you, on the anniversary of its signing. Then, take the issues to candidates everywhere and draw up a Parties and Candidates Audit across the whole civil liberties and human rights agenda before the end of the year, not by questionnaire but by meetings, public and private, in pubs, tea rooms and bars. Then, hold a convention of some kind in June 2010, face to face with the incoming government.

And then tonight they came for sight. We knew they might.
A minute back they turned into our street.
The door we've blocked with books now shakes.
We play them tapes we had prepared
then hiss and mouth our tongueless chorus.

The sorts of rights FDR and his followers promote are instruments of more or less Draconian tyranny. Because they are peddled as well intentioned efforts to do us good, resistance to them is difficult to articulate without seeming to be mean. But resistance to them is nonetheless imperative—it is a large measure of the vigilance that’s the price of liberty.