Freedom is just another word for "a gap in the law"

The Home Secretary wants to ban more things

There are many ways in which freedom can be expressed.

For example, the eminent jurist Janis Joplin averred that freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.

And our current Home Secretary has found another way to convey what freedom means.

Freedom, for Shabana Mahmood, is just another word for there being a gap in the law.

Generally speaking, in a liberal democracy, the position for the individual is that they are free to do what they wish as long as there is not a law against it.

(Until the ECHR case of Malone, the position of the UK government was also that it was free to do as it wished - even to citizens - unless there was a law against it, and one of the many unsung benefits of membership of that convention is that this is no longer the case.)

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For the Home Secretary a freedom to do a thing only means that there must be “a gap in the law” which presumably must be filled.

What an individual is free to do now should be prohibited.

Something unbanned should be banned.

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In this particular context, a right to protest should only be allowed once or twice. It does not matter if the thing being protested continued, that is it: your time is up, you’ve had your fun and now you’re going to be arrested and prosecuted.

Immediate protests only will be allowed and if they don’t work then one cannot repeat the protest.

The problem here, of course, is that some Bad Things endure. They can last days and weeks and years and even decades.

In principle, a person should be able to protest about a Bad Thing at any time and for as long as the Bad Thing continues.

And sometimes a Bad Thing - like Apartheid in South Africa - eventually buckles, in part because of the constant protests.

Sometimes a protest needs to be frequent and repeated because of the frequent or repeated or continual or worsening nature of the Bad Thing being protested.

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Of course, freedom of expression is a qualified right, and so it needs to be balanced against the rights of others.

But that balancing exercise should be on a case-by-case basis.

Blanket prohibitions by the state should be avoided.

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There are many “gaps in the law” where people act freely without prohibitions.

These “gaps” are not somehow failures of the law.

Indeed, prohibitions (and mandatory obligations) are instead the divides between free spaces.

And those free spaces should be as wide as possible.