Is the tide turning? Is the country waking up at last?

A fortnight ago the Home Office banned Geert Wilders, Dutch MP and producer of the anti-Islam film Fitna (http://www.themoviefitna.com/fitna-the-movie) from entering the country, in part because jailbird Lord Ahmed promised 10,000 Muslims on the streets in protest. It was a depressing denial of freedom of speech by a government that somehow manages to be both supine and hectoring at the same time.

The erosion of our liberties has been going on for decades but, to lift our spirits, it seems the fight-back has started. There is a sold-out Convention on Modern Liberty (http://www.modernliberty.net) this weekend that I’d give my right arm to attend.

Sponsored by Liberty, The Guardian, Joseph Rowntree and openDemocracy, the Convention organisers point out that 60 years after Britain was the proud co-author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), we are now faced with ‘unprecedented… challenges to our rights, freedoms and democracy’. They argue we are the ‘inheritors of an inspiring tradition of liberty’, and through the Convention they are issuing a ‘call for the renewal of our democratic self-confidence’. Amen to that.

Significantly the Convention draws together people from across the political spectrum. The rights-loving Left comes together with the freedom-loving Right and Tony Benn sits on the same platform as David Davis MP. Maybe this is another sign of the break-up of the old-style turn-of-the-century political categories and of the re-drawing of political boundaries and alliances.

Earlier this week a courageous woman made a little-noticed call about an under-publicised aspect of the UDHR. In a Question for Short Debate in the House of Lords, Baroness Caroline Cox asked the government about the persecution of religious believers in contravention of Article 18 of the UDHR (http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.com/pa/ld200809/ldhansrd/text/90224-0011.htm#09022472000227).

Caroline Cox is an extraordinary woman who displays quintessentially English qualities. Modest, fearless, practical and restless, with a passion for the under-dog and a mild dose of attractive eccentricity,  she has busied herself over the years with dispensing aid and love to the most persecuted and forgotten communities on earth. Often at great personal risk in conflict zones and frequently in situations of real personal hardship, she has helped and comforted dispossessed people in Nagorno-Karabakh, Burma, North Korea, northern Nigeria, Sudan and northern Uganda amongst others. She has seen human misery at its worst and faith at its most hopeful.

When she speaks she does so with real authority based on her first-hand experience. She knows what she is talking about.

In the House of Lords this week the Baroness pointed out that while around the globe millions of people suffer because of their religious and atheist beliefs, national governments – including our own – only half-heartedly support Article 18 of the UDHR (that is, the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; to change religion or belief; and to outwardly express religion or belief).

She also highlighted the attempts of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to protect Islam from criticism by repeatedly promoting a spurious ‘Combating Defamation of Religions’ resolution at the UN General Assembly.

I’ll return to the subject of the OIC and its defamation resolution in a future post dv, and I may find myself irresistibly compelled to defame their religion as espoused by fundamentalist members of the OIC such as the Wahhabi Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

But meanwhile let’s celebrate the efforts of Caroline Cox and the Convention organisers. While there are such people impacting public debate, the lights of liberty cannot be fully extinguished.