Congratulations to the Iraqi national football team on winning the Asian Cup! The Asian Cup is the top continental honour that an Asian national team can win, and marks an historic achievement for Iraq (whose Under-23 team narrowly missed out on a medal at the Olympics in 2004). The final was played against Saudi Arabia, and was won 1-0 in front of a packed stadium in Jakarta, thanks to a late winner scored by Younis Mahmoud of Kirkuk. Earlier in the tournament, they had beaten Australia, co-hosts Vietnam, and South Korea (on penalties).

The libertarian opinion on the Iraq war is split quite widely. In fact, it’s pretty much split straight down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Most British libertarians are proactivists, and were in favour of toppling Saddam Hussein; most Americans are isolationists, and were opposed.

However, whatever your opinion, this victory can only be a good thing for fledgling Iraqi democracy, free-market economy, and liberty. By winning the Asian Cup, the second biggest title in Iraq’s national sport, the bedevilled country has achieved its greatest ever sporting accomplishment. If the national unity created in today’s moment of ecstasy can hold, Iraq may well develop the national identity that it needs, and take hold of its own situation, and flourish as a free and prosperous nation as it never has before.

Today, we can but hope, but tonight belongs to the people of Iraq!

It’s no surprise that the Blair years were tough ones for those of us that care deeply about the fundamental rights of the British people. Time and again, liberty was crushed under-foot by a statist juggernaut that thought nothing of taxing and regulating, of criminalising and persecuting.

When citing the government’s illiberalism, legislativism, or centralism, the statistic that is usually brought up is the staggering number of human actions outlawed since 1997: over 3,000, or almost 1 new criminal offence a day, by one count. That’s scary statism at its worst (ironically, according to opinion polls, the public thinks it’s New Labour at its best).

However, that legislative diarrhoea is not even nearly the worst of it. Because, actually, the government doesn’t need to criminalise your action to punish you for it. Under the Terrorism Act 2006, anyone can be detained without trial for 28 days, and treated like a criminal, without the need for the authorities to grant even the courtesy of explaining why one is being detained. The 14-day period was probably intolerable in itself (press charges first, then keep them imprisoned for two weeks: not the other way around). The current limit is worse.

However, despite the current 28-day limit being an Intolerable Act perpetrated against the freedom of man, the government wants to push it further. Gordon Brown has announced his desire to DOUBLE that time again, up to 56 days. In the Commons today, he said that he was “not in favour of indefinite detention”, yet went on to justify his doctrine of imprisoning the innocent for two months because it would be subject to “parliamentary votes”.

Ahem. Pardon my cynicism. So it won’t be decided by Downing Street, but by the House of Commons? And the Prime Minister is nominated by? Oh, right, the House of Commons. Sure, it’s true the government lost the last time they tried to push the 90-day measure through, but that only goes to prove how bad a law it was. Then again, when you have Desmond Tutu comparing your policies to those in Apartheid South Africa, you can be pretty sure it’s not exactly a good law.

The fact that’s lost on Brown, and most people in politics for that matter, is that it doesn’t really matter who’s responsible. Whether it’s an executive or a legislative, an elected officer or an unelected one, an elderly reactionary or a youthful radical, any tyranny is tyranny enough. The fact that Parliament gets to vote, rather than being passed by diktat, is no saving grace. Not for those left to rot in Belmarsh, and not for British liberties.

Were the average person to look at one of this year’s new £20 Bank of England banknotes, it may seem a tad confusing for him or her to find a reference to a factory manufacturing pins. In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, describes the economic concept of division of labour, by which each person specialised in a particular task and several people combined these respective products to increase efficiency, in terms of what he saw at the time: pin-making.

Nowadays, we find the example risible not because it doesn’t hold the same basic economic fact that it did when Smith wrote it in 1776, but because it seems so trivial, so small-scale. Today, we would see the smallest examples of division of labour all around us, but nowhere more so than on the production line. So much do we take the awesome productive power of the production line for granted, that we forget that there was once a time where no such innovation existed.

In the early summer of 1903, there were few more nervous men in Detroit, nay the whole of the United States, than Henry Ford, the majority proprietor and name-bearer of a small automobile-building factory. Ford had sunk his entire fortune into the enterprise: an enterprise that was down to its last few dollars. No-one had yet ordered one of his ‘Model A’s, and the company was going under.

However, salvation for the company came on 23 July 1903, in the form of a German doctor in Chicago, Dr Ernst Pfenning, who took a chance on Ford, and ordered one (out of self-interest, mind!). It would be the first of 1,750 produced over the following year. From then on, it was to bigger and better things that Ford aspired to and attained, culminating in the dominance of the Ford Model T. Ford introduced a style of industrialism based on the large-scale division of labour, centred on the production line that had been pioneered by Eli Whitney, that bears his name: Fordism.

If the sum of man’s accomplishments can be measured by the sum of his products, there can be few men that have ever achieved more than Ford. The cornerstone of the new Fordist economic order, the production line, unleashed the capacity of people to produce in a way never seen before. Had Ford’s factories been around in 1776, there can be no doubt that it would be the car factory, and not the pin factory, that would be recorded as Adam Smith’s archetypal division of labour, and the mainstay of the new economic order.

John F. Kennedy is not a particularly big hero to the libertarian movement. Sure, we’re all up on not asking our country to do anything for us, but not too keen on letting the state demand anything it wants of us. However, not only did he certainly know enough of libertarian ideas on taxation, he had the nature of liberty down to a T, when he said, “Liberty without learning is always in peril, and learning without liberty is always in vain.”

Taking that to heart, this past week, thirty young libertarians (and one young liberal conservative: that’s entryism for you) have been in Cambridge, learning about liberty, to help defend their ideals. Held at Sidney Sussex College, Freedom Week is a week-long programme of seminars, designed to help develop ideas and networks crucial to move the libertarian movement forward. Better than that, due to the generous support of its sponsors, it’s entirely free for attendees, including all lectures and full-board, not to mention drinks on Freedom Week’s organiser.

That organiser is JP Floru (as assisted by our own Charles Groome) of the Freedom Alliance, who bases Freedom Week upon similar programmes in the United States. The programme covers all topics of classical liberal thought, from the economic to the social, from the historical to the philosophical, and covering public policy issues as diverse as education, the environment, and the European Union. And those are just the ones beginning with ‘E’s.

The result is a well-rounded and thoroughly-engaging series of talks, delivered by some of the foremost experts in their respective fields, and a sense of intellectual rigour that other philosophies simply lack. It is also a great chance to make good friends with innumerable fellow libertarians from across the country, even the globe, and a chance to prove that libertarians can have fun (even in an empty summer-time university city). For all that John F. Kennedy frustrated libertarians, he was certainly onto something when he talked of liberty and learning going hand in hand. And he also had good times down, too.

Editor: If you’d like to know more about what went on at Freedom Week, get more information about organisers, lecturers, or attendees, or attend next year, feel free to email me at president [at] ucllibertarians.com.

For the past two centuries, it’s been beaten into the British to hate the French, and all their (many, multitudinous, myriad) idiosyncrasies. However, as un-British as it may seem to celebrate the French national holiday, today, I found myself hoisting the red-white-and-blue and marking Bastille Day with as much pride as the most slimy and garlicky Provençal vintner. Every patriotic Briton should feel the same.

Despite what people say, what Bastille Day marked was not the end of monarchy in France. Instead, it was end of absolute monarchy: a system of government unchecked by constitutional limits, unfettered by morality or respect for the rights of any person but the King, and, crucially, completely different to the system used on this side of the Channel. Ours, as a representative monarchy, has been enshrined since Magna Carta, dating back to 1215.

Lacking a French Magna Carta, King Louis XVI was free to rule by decree, arbitrarily and without care. For all the boasts of ‘philosopher kings’, no French king ruled with any intellectual rigour or reason. When, on 11 July 1789, Louis XVI’s Finance Minister, Jacques Necker, advised the King to begin to budget his personal expenses, he was fired for his impudence. This act, one of reason against unreason and compromise against absolutism, sparked the Storming of the Bastille three days later.

The distinction between an absolute monarchy and a constitutionally-bound one is crucial. Whilst every French king was grotesquely unpopular in France, the British king at the time of the French Revolution, George III, was beloved by all, despite his mental faculties and colonial successes (or lack thereof). Even the future George IV, whose profligacy with money (and women) is and was renowned, was never under threat of losing his head, for one simple reason: whereas the French monarchs ruled in spite of the people, the British monarchs ruled because of the people.

Constitutionally-limited monarchy gives the framework of apolitical and non-partisan leadership, with a leader responsible for upholding the rights of the citizen guaranteed by such agreements as Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights. Instead of being the statist element that is most arbitary, in a representative democracy, a constitutionally-bound monarch becomes the one that is most constant, and most likely to uphold the natural rights of the people from the otherwise unchecked terrors of either an absolute monarchy or a deified democracy.

That the United Kingdom has enjoyed this for so many centuries, and that France’s diametrically-opposed system collapsed so readily in the face of pitchfork-armed farmers (a taste of things to come), ought to be a celebration of our uniqueness, and the success of our (relatively) people-centric historic constitutional system. Our dislike of absolute rule makes ours the exceptional system that proves the rule.

Rarely is the most down-trodden man the most angry.  No matter what ideology they espoused, of history’s best-remembered revolutionaries - from Maximillien Robespierre to Sir Roger Casement, from George Washington to Che Guevara - a great many have actually sprouted from the ruling class that they sought to overthrow.  Disenfranchised even of their ability to fight back, rarely do the most abused rise up against their oppressors.  However, once in a blue moon, they do.

In 1839, one such group of disenfranchised and down-trodden did throw off their chains.  They were a group of trans-Atlantic passengers on a Spanish ferry, heading to the United States for a new life: a life of imprisonment, slavery, and inhumanity.  La Amistad carried a cargo of enslaved Africans, who had been illegally brought into the Americas despite a 20-year-old ban on the slave trade.

However, on the 2nd July of that year, the captives, led by Joseph Cinqué, rose up in revolt, killed the captain, took control of the Amistad, and ordered its return to Africa.  Due to deception by the ship’s navigator, the ship instead headed for New York, where they were captured by the US Navy and sold as slaves.  Only due to the Constitutional oversight of a free and independent legislature were the slaves declared as they legally always had been: free men.

The Amistad case is one of the most famous steps in the history of the abolition of slavery in the United States, and thereafter those parts of the world that still practised the barbarity.  Those that fought back on 2nd July 1839 were down-trodden and disenfranchised, the lowest of the low, but fought back because their slavery was so explicit and so complete.

However, all those oppressed by the power of the state, small and mighty alike, are enslaved as if held in chattel.  Just as the deprival of life by force is murder and the deprival of property by force is theft, so the deprival of liberty by force, always and everywhere, is slavery.