Liberty is a noble cause, invoked in grandiloquent terms to endorse the historic struggle against tyranny. But what about the liberty to express opinions or crack jokes that a minority finds offensive, or that the majority deems obnoxious, without being censored? Or the freedom of a Shameless stereotype to walk through a privatised city centre shopping mall without being stopped by security guards, or simply the freedom of teenagers to hang about on street corners without being subjected to ASBOs and dispersal orders? Should we not stand against the infringements on these less high-minded freedoms, too?

In these two quite different books, the philosophy professor A. C. Grayling and the social affairs journalist Anna Minton raise important questions about the meaning of liberty in contemporary society and what we are prepared to defend today.

In Liberty in the Age of Terror, Grayling enters “the war over civil liberties being waged in Western democracies”. Firing from the liberal Left, he takes aim at the repressive measures that the authorities in the UK and the US have imposed in the name of public safety and the “war on terror”, before skirmishing with intellectuals from Roger Scruton on the Right to Slavoj Zizek on the Left.

Grayling upholds some principles that should be tattooed inside the eyelids of any politician who claims to be a liberal democrat: that liberties are indivisible and universal; that free speech is “the fundamental civil liberty”, even though it means allowing “bad free speech ranging from the stupid to the malicious and dangerous”; and that, far from being abandoned in response to a threat such as terrorism, “these principles are precisely for the hard times: sticking by them is what makes a society truly just and worthy of respect”.

This is a welcome change from the illiberal liberalism of the new Labour age, which always sees another ban or restriction as the solution. Yet even the liberal professor could have been bolder in defence of his principles.

He nails identity politics as one of the greatest threats to liberty today, given the propensity of groups to demand — and be granted — protection against words that they find offensive. This struck a chord: 20 years ago, as the editor of Living Marxism magazine, I launched a campaign for the right to be offensive. Rather predictably, however, the one illiberal identity that Grayling picks out is religion, in particular Islam. Of course we must insist on the right to interrogate or ridicule religious beliefs. But what about unearthing the roots of victim identity politics on the Left? How about hammering feminists demanding bans on “hate speech”, anti-racists demanding “no platform” for the likes of the BNP, gay activists reporting Christians to the police for suggesting that homosexuality is a sin, greens who want “climate change deniers” censored or even put on trial? If liberty truly is indivisible, then it has to mean more than “free speech for people like me”. It is only ever the unpopular and offensive ideas of the age that need protecting — the mainstream can look after itself.

Grayling sees genuine tolerance as the answer to this problem. Yet he also insists that “tolerance not only cannot but must not tolerate intolerance”. Personally, I cannot stand for such intolerant tolerance. I am with Voltaire, who declared in his essay on tolerance, “Think for yourselves, and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too”. Perhaps it is the loss of faith in the capacity of most others to think for themselves that means a liberal such as Grayling now looks to written constitutions and human rights judges to grant us liberties from above, as if that “war over civil liberties” has become a civil war within the legal-political elite. But the lesson of history is surely that the more the people are involved in the fight for their freedom — often a bloody one, as Grayling notes — the greater liberty that results.

Campaigns on liberty run by human rights lawyers focus narrowly on anti- terror laws. Yet as Minton shows in her compelling study Ground Control, there are wider issues of liberty affecting how millions live in our urban environments today.

Minton goes from Docklands in London to Manchester and beyond to document how the much-vaunted urban regeneration of recent years has marked “the death of the city” as a living public sphere. The privatisation of public space and facilities, from the collapse of social house building to the rise of privately owned malls and gated communities in the centre of great cities, has gone alongside a culture of increasing authoritarian controls. As one city planning lawyer says of the new private-public space, “These are areas where the Englishman is allowed as a privilege not a right”.

Through policies with Americanised titles such as “clean and safe”, “defensible space” or “secured by design”, the British authorities have sought to sanitise our cities. As Minton observes, the drive for “perfect order and cleanliness” also means “cleaning out many of the people”.

Minton argues that the rising fear of crime reflects the loss of trust among atomised urban populations more than any change in actual crime rates. She recalls Jane Jacobs’ 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which argued that real safety in the city comes from “natural surveillance” by strangers with their eyes on the street. A feeling of trust among strangers is thus paramount but, as Jacobs observed, “its cultivation cannot be institutionalised” by the authorities. That warning has been ignored by the British authorities, Minton says, with the result that their interventionist policing “solutions” are now part of the problem.

Of course, as Minton acknowledges, our cities always have to change, and there are many advantages to the cleaned-up façades and facilities of Docklands or Manchester. But we have lost something of our cities’ free spirit in the process. Minton reminds the authorities that “life is no fun if it is too safe” — an idea like a stinkbomb under the noses of the urban controllers looking down on the sanitised city. She hopes that the crisis in the economy and the housing market might now encourage a rethink and moves towards more European-style cities with a piazza culture. Perhaps. What seems certain is that just as it requires the people to defend popular liberties, so the public will have to take back public spaces from the new army of pecksniffs and prodnoses.

Liberty in the Age of Terror: A Defence of Civil Society and Enlightenment by A. C. Grayling

Bloomsbury, £12.99 £11.69; 304pp

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First Century City by Anna Minton

Penguin, £9.99 £9.49; 304pp

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