While the government continues tearing down bureaucratic fences (Moss, 2012) it is worth considering the policies that created those systems.
As the Victorian era drew to a close, accounts were published detailing the lives of the poor around Britain - by Rowntree in York and by Booth in London.
Meanwhile, the Liberal party underwent a change of attitude. After a decade out of power Gladstone's party had moved away from classical liberalism and toward social liberalism.
These moves coincided with the sentiments of the time, taking the party that featured Asquith, Lloyd George and Churchill into government. These Liberals sought policies favouring positive liberty in order to counter the problems exposed by Rowntree & Booth.
Elected into government, the party enacted the liberal welfare reforms; including free school meals and national insurance based welfare & pensions. These liberal reforms sought to accomplish more than just staying out of the way, taking head on the difficult contrasts of positive liberty - that structure can restrict and unhelpfully constrain, but also emancipate and liberate.
Such positive measures will always be toeing a very difficult line. The present attempts to update certain police powers in line with advances in technology - allowing the interception or monitoring of certain kinds of digital communications along the same lines as phone calls or mail (BBC, 2012) - have met with a great deal of controversy.
The emphasis with positive liberty is on what can be done to enable - creating limited structures designed to bring relief from the corrupt barriers that laisse-faire may build. While we can discover much about ourselves from what we are in the dark, most of our time is spent being bombarded by the whims of others - giving us a need for shelter or a leg-up where our natural situation offers not even the possibility of developing either.
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References:
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+ Richard Moss 'Can England's new enterprise zones get growth going?'; 13 April 2012.
+ BBC's 'Warning over need for safeguards in email and web monitoring plan'; 2 April 2012.
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