What Price Liberty?, By Ben Wilson

In late 2006, Nick Griffin – MEP, as of Sunday – was acquitted along with a BNP sidekick after a prosecution for incitement to racial hatred based on remarks at a private meeting filmed undercover by the BBC. As jubilant supporters chanted "Freedom!", the blustering bigot had a fit of oratory and proclaimed that "they cannot take our hearts, they cannot take our tongues and they cannot take our freedom". The rhetoric of British liberties had drawn a cloak of virtue around the politics of hate. Yet – however much it hurts to say so – the BNP chief had right on his side this time. Principled libertarians may sometimes have to defend the ugly as well as the comely faces of freedom against state encroachment.

What Price Liberty?, by a young historian who enviably combines a gift for rattling narrative with the lucid exposition of shifting laws, ideas and arguments, rubs on such raw nerves at every turn. Ben Wilson chronicles the always-disputed rise and fall of individual freedoms in Britain from the civil wars, military and ideological, of the 17th century to today's intrusive age of "dataveillance", statutory bans on "religious hatred" and catch-all anti-terror laws.

Built around the gloomy premise that "the liberal phase in our history seems to be coming to an end", his bracing synthesis of case-studies, flashpoints, political theories, lively précis of tracts or trials and close-focus storytelling shows that the national grip on liberty has seldom held firm. Never granted from above by benevolent rulers, and never riveted in place by codes and constitutions, our liberties grew piecemeal in "moments of storm and passion", via boat-rocking minority campaigns often pursued by "seedy adventurers" in the teeth of all respectable opinion. They triumphed – if they did – by accident and blunder.

Prior licensing of books and newspapers lapsed in 1695 solely due to a "legislative fumble". The libertine radical John Wilkes stage-managed the case of Entick vs Carrington in 1763 to prove that ministers could be subject to the common law when their enforcers raided the homes of dissidents.

"Liberty has come from calculated provocation and opportunism," Wilson maintains, as well as from "large mobs of people who have scared the government". And small mobs, too. Introduced in wartime, identity cards almost went up in smoke in 1951 when the British Housewives' League tried to burn theirs outside Parliament. Rain spoiled the party (though Mrs Irene Lovelock was "partly successful with a frying pan", reported The Times). The cards soon died, in 1952. Time and again, "the direct action of bloody-minded individuals" has widened liberty for all.

Wilson takes the standard outline of the "Whig interpretation of history" – with British freedom rising step by step towards an ever-more glorious future – and turns a torch-beam of sceptical analysis on it. Riven by quarrels and setbacks, the landscape of liberty that emerges looks far rockier than the sturdy utopia of 19th-century liberal myth.

The British, under this scrutiny, love the idea of liberty but turn a blind eye to its erosion. From Cromwell's Protectorate in the 1650s, the counter-revolutionary repressions after 1793 and the protest-strangling Six Acts of 1819, through to the quasi-dictatorial Defence of the Realm and Emergency Powers Acts of two world wars and the wave of anti-terror measures that started to break (prior to 11 September) in 2000, the state has picked up "nasty habits of authoritarianism" at regular intervals. Most citizens, in Wilson's melancholy view, have connived in their own shackling for the sake of security, especially after the iron age of 20th-century total war when "respect for liberty and belief in democracy" wore thin. His Britons sometimes will be slaves – if a Pitt, a Lloyd George or a Blair can frighten them enough.

Because of his primary focus on the arena of Isaiah Berlin's "negative liberty", the freedom from official interference in behaviour, belief and expression, Wilson cannot also write a definitive history of the struggle for democratic and collective rights. So Chartists and Suffragists, anti-slavery Abolitionists and trade-union activists (except when menaced by heavy-handed policing and proscription the General or the Miners' Strike), appear only as minor players. A figure as pivotal to the joint pursuit of civil liberty and social justice as Tom Paine, who died 200 years ago this week, merits just a cameo.

Wilson sounds like an internal dissenter in the big Whig tent of freedom. He can hear all the tempests outside – whether provoked by a minority-rights culture of "victims and claimants" or by the hi-tech hand of the surveillance state – but above all raises his impressively eloquent voice to affirm that "the great tragedy of modern times is that the idea of liberty has disappeared from our culture". It has fractured, of course; but disappeared? Time spent with John Stuart Mill – a towering presence here – is never wasted. Yet even Mill (in The Subjection of Women) had by the late 1860s begun to probe the flaws in the classical paradigm of British liberty.

As does Wilson, sure enough, but with a grain of attractive nostalgia for the Hogarthian awkward squad of free-born Englishmen, mocking the magistrate and pelting the constable before diving into a tavern to get liberally plastered on free-brewed English ale. I certainly enjoyed meeting Brass Crosby, the "bibulous, plain-talking, oath-spouting" Lord Mayor of London in 1770. By arresting a Sergeant-at-Arms sent to detain a City printer, he helped establish the open reporting of parliamentary debates. "The hearing took place in Crosby's bedroom, where he had retired suffering from gout."

Closer to the present day, Wilson sometimes misses liberty's wood for its trees. Sensitive and sensible, his discussions of multi-cultural dilemmas, Danish cartoons and such freedom-draining measures as the Racial and Religious Hatred Act have a laboured feel (compared, say, to Kenan Malik's urgent From Fatwa to Jihad). Still, he does underline the sheer glee with which New Labour's managerial regime has scorned the traditional bulwarks of civic freedom. Blairite ministers "queued up to ridicule liberty". His account of the science and strategy behind the surveillance state is minatory and brilliant, with a chilling sketch of risk-assessment technology that can silently monitor every corner of our lives like some stealth fighter that combines "intensive firepower with zero radio profile". Against the mantra that the innocent have nothing to fear from this hi-tech supervision, Wilson counters that we should fear "the loss of privacy which is at the heart of liberty".

He rightly stresses that this precious "private freedom" rests in the last resort on a flourishing "civil society" that today's anxious, distrustful populace by and large neglects. Assuming that freedoms bring shared as well as individual benefits ("When we have less liberty, we are less safe" ), he scarcely has the chance to prove it. His shining heroes remain those stiff-necked mavericks, like Clydeside trade unionist David Kirkwood, who finally cared more for individual than collective rights.

For all his radical militancy, Kirkwood "saw the state as an overbearing Leviathan which working people should stave off at all costs". The stifling provisions of the DORA legislation in 1914, which Kirkwood bravely fought, appear in Wilson's splendidly Mill-ian book as the first tremors of a long nightmare of control from which we never awoke. For the anarchic free-born Briton, it's been downhill ever since. At least, the "libertarian publisher" Ernest Benn thought so. Until August 1914, he recalled, the uncowed British had not yet acquired "the German habit of queueing".