There's a question much loved by political theorists, widely used in trying to get their students into political theory, and it usually goes like this: ‘Liberty and Equality: Must they Conflict?’. If you put it to students now, they might think there's something just a little odd about this question. Surely, if there is any question to be asked, it is whether liberty and security must conflict. Shifting the question this way would be a reasonable reflection of the extent to which security has come to the fore as perhaps the pre-eminent issue. One can now go for weeks or months without encountering the question ‘liberty versus equality’ in everyday debate; one can hardly say the same about ‘liberty versus security’. Likewise, one can go for days without reading in the newspapers about issues pertaining to equality, but one can barely turn a page (or a corner, for that matter) without coming up against the question of security.

So if these are bad days for equality, then they are also bad days for liberty. For any claim to liberty in the contemporary world quickly runs up against the (counter-)demand for security. Much of the discussion concerning the theory and practices surrounding security centres on the relationship between these and their consequences for liberty. Either explicitly or implicitly, the assumption is that we must forego a certain amount of liberty in our desire for security.