Hello and welcome to Trigonometry I'm Francis Foster I'm

Constantine kitchen and this is a show for you if you want honest

conversations with fascinating people.

Our brilliant and returning guest today is the editor of Spike magazine.

Brendan and O'Neill welcome back to Trigonometry.

Hi guys. It's good to have you back man.

Good to be here. Listen, it's been an interesting year just before we started.

We were talking about how you know I started the whole lockdown thing strongly disagreeing with the position you guys took and then eventually have come around to

lockdown skepticism if you like and we will maybe talk about the vaccine and all

of that stuff later but give us we're almost at the end of the year

give us we're almost at the end of the year give us a civil liberties view of

2020 what has happened in this time nothing good I think this year 2020 has been a complete disaster for civil liberties.

But I think it's even worse than that. I think the civil liberties thing, I've been thinking about this, I think it's a bit of a red herring

in the broader discussion about freedom. I mean civil liberties are incredibly important

the right to protest the right to petition your leaders legal rights the right to silence the right to

trial by jury all those kinds of legal rights are incredibly important and they accentuate the liberty of the individual.

But I think there's something a bit less tangible that's really been destroyed in 2020, which is the culture of freedom. I mean civil liberties are relatively easily reinstated. I mean parliamentarians could just put them back on the

statute books and there you are you have the right to protest again it's just

been returned to us but I think the broader culture of freedom which is the

confidence of individuals to make decisions

to engage in public life to take responsibility for their lives I think that's what's

taken a real beating this year because when your life is micromanaged to such an extraordinary degree that politicians are telling you who you can hug, what you should eat in a pub, how many people you can have Christmas dinner with.

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