It often feels there are only three topics worth discussing: sex, death and freedom. And the first two generally lead to the third. An old boyfriend used to joke when cares overwhelmed me: “You can fake your own death and escape to Panama.” But freedom from life’s impositions and greater tyrannies is seldom that simple.
By the time this issue hits doorsteps, the US will have elected a president who will bear the portentous title, “leader of the free world”. Whether that individual will strengthen or diminish our sense of liberty remains to be seen. As Gavin Esler and others point out in these pages, the system of democratic government is under threat from all sides; some democracies are far less freedom-loving than others.
That is why we sent barrister Sam Fowles to interview Shami Chakrabarti. Few people are as eloquent on the fact that freedom is necessarily a relative concept; one person’s rights are almost always competing with another’s, as we’ve seen recently in the UK with debates about gender, free speech and immigration. Across the globe, all too often, power, money or firepower trumps fairness.
Liberty has been much on my mind since a trip to Albania for a Freedom and Transformation event at the end of September, curated by the LSE’s Lea Ypi and Joanne Ooi’s EA Festival. It was attended by the fearless writer of this month’s Journal, journalist Sally Hayden, who flew back to her home in Beirut afterwards, just as Israeli forces started bombing the city.
Albania was sobering, a European country that was ruled by a Marxist dictator for four decades and didn’t see the demise of Communism until the elections of 1992. Where inhabitants were constantly under surveillance from the secret police and dissenters were routinely dispatched to internment and forced labour camps.
The trip made me want to interrogate what we mean by freedom, from many angles, in Perspective. One is Guy Shrubsole’s Right to Roam campaign, which seeks to open up more of Britain’s countryside to the public. Another is Toby Green’s report on the 25-year incarceration of Kurdish activist Abdullah Öcalan in Turkey – a dissident whose plight has been underreported because of western political alliances.
On a lighter note, former Python Michael Palin talks about his peripatetic life as a travel presenter, while Stephanie Theobald makes an odyssey round the cannabis stores of Los Angeles, a trek made possible by liberalised drug laws. Showgirl-turned-author Ruth Ivo discusses her quest to forge a liberated identity as a mother and lover, while Keggie Carew explores the poetry and profound meaning in the expression “free as a bird”.
May you all find escapist solace in our Freedom issue.
Rowan Pelling, Editor
