Alan Beith

"Green authoritarians" pose a new threat to freedom, senior Liberal Democrat Alan Beith has said.

Against a background of eco-doom headlines the Lib Dems will continue to carry the torch for human progress, the party's deputy leader has told ePolitix.com.

Beith has used this year's conference to reaffirm his party's commitment to freedom.

"I think liberalism and liberal democracy is an optimistic creed," he said.

Prospects are not necessarily as dark as some paint them, the Berwick MP insisted, challenging fashionable anti-globalists - including those in his own party.

"Globalisation for many people actually increases liberty," he insisted.

Viewed optimistically, modern economic developments boost choice rather than restricting it as some claim and Beith said that environmentalists should not impose their own choices on others.

"I don't drink Coca Cola but if you like it you can buy it on the other side of the world. For most people, whatever we may like to think, that's additional choice, it gives them greater freedoms," he said.

Beith warned environmental campaigners not to "demonise" freedom-bearing technologies.

"Many of the things that present problems to the environment, like cheaper air travel, to many people are a source of freedom so we must not demonise important ways in which the world is developing," he told this website.

"One of the things [I am] trying to do is get away from this very crude notion - which some of the anti-capitalist campaigners are trying to convey - that 'it's all bad' and somehow we can get back to very primitive kind of society in which none of these things exist."

"That would be a much less free society for most people."

But, Beith stressed, the Liberal Democrats' long association with environmentalism is different to the views of some contemporary eco-warriors.

"We're the original green party of British politics but we are not green authoritarians trying to destroy people's choices on assumptions that are not always sustainable."

The Lib Dem approach uses the "freedom test" to strike a balance between our choices now and possible threats to the planet's future.

And Beith cautioned that restrictions in the name of yet unborn generations must be based on evidence.

"You can not take away all the choices of this generation in the process of protecting the freedom of the next. You have to look at each area of decision and weigh the balance and also the degree of possibility and certainty you've got," he said.

"Measures that allow people choice but make sure that choice isn't loaded against the environment are better than authoritarian measures."

Do-gooders, says Beith, can get it wrong if they forget freedom.

He also believes that Labour's ditching of socialist values has left the government morally adrift on questions of liberty.

"Someone like David Blunkett, and there are many others like him, has abandoned a life-long commitment to socialism, with a degree of civil liberties mixed in with it...having abandoned all that there is really no guide, there is no threshold in his mind to cross when advocating some new measure," he said.

"We have a threshold to cross, which is to ask what freedom am I taking away with this action and am I justified."

Not liking something is not an argument for bans - no matter how well intentioned.

"New Labour is trying to run the country in the way it thinks best, trying to do us all good, as they see it, without any framework of reference," said Beith.

"There are a lot of things that some of us don't like or indeed may really detest or loathe. But we have to ask are we entitled to use the criminal law to stop doing or watching."

While the freedom idea was a source of "anguish" to Conservative and Labour supporters, it was and would remain the Lib Dems' lifeblood, vowed Beith

"We stand firmly with the values which have brought people into the party, which are woven into the party's fabric, which excite and inspire people. That is not the case for either of the other parties," he said.