It is an unwritten law of Lib Dem debates on security issues that before long someone will quote Benjamin Franklin that ‘Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.’

I have always been intrigued by the origins of this comment, primarily because taken on its own and literally, it is hyperbolic nonsense. Almost any form of government involves some tension between liberty and security. The state provides defence and police forces, but to do so levies taxes and circumscribes individuals’ freedom to use force to defend themselves.

There seems to be very little on the web about what Franklin actually meant. But an academic paper by Benjamin Wittes of Brookings Institute unsurprisingly reveals that Franklin’s aphorism was intended in a very different sense from that in which it is now so often quoted. Franklin wasn’t writing about individual civil liberties, but rather about the right of a legislature to levy taxes.

As Wittes explains it, in 1755 the Pennsylvania Assembly was seeking to levy a tax for frontier defence. The governor kept vetoing this, because the Assembly wanted to tax the absentee Penn family. Franklin’s comment was in the context of the family offering a contribution towards frontier defence in exchange for acceptance that the Assembly had no power to tax them.

Franklin rejected this solution, and in this circumstance what he wrote makes absolute sense. Accepting a voluntary donation towards ‘Safety’ would mean the Assembly giving up its ability (‘liberty’) to tax the Penn family and in so doing compromise its ability to raise money for future security. So it would indeed ‘deserve neither’. But the principle of the state using coercive powers (taxation) to provide for safety was not at issue.

I won’t discuss at length here Wittes’ detailed argument for seeing security and freedom as in ‘hostile symbiosis’, rather than ‘crude balance’, as this would take me way beyond the LDV word count. But in a democracy, security measures can legitimately be put forward as a way of defending freedom rather than simply restricting it.

The most extreme example of this is during wartime, when measures such as press censorship, conscription of citizens and internment without trail of enemy sympathisers have been introduced. At one level these are restrictions on freedom in the name of security. But in a war between a democracy and a dictatorship, the calculation is also that victory for the latter is a far bigger threat to liberty than short-term security measures carried out by the former.

To give a more current example, although I baulk sometimes about the officiousness of airport security measures, as a nervous flyer I find they increase my confidence that the aeroplane will arrive safely at its intended destination and hence enhance my freedom to travel.

In judging security issues, Liberals are rightly wary of the extent to which government measures threaten our civil liberties. But we should also remember that effective security is necessary to protect liberty.

Photo of Benjamin Franklin statue at the Old Town Hall, Boston, USA by Robert Linsdell

* Iain Sharpe has been a Liberal Democrat councillor in Watford since 1991. To read more about the history of the Liberal Democrats in Watford, see Winning the Watford Way, published by the Local Government Association Liberal Democrat Group.