Tony Blair presents a spooky liberty-utility calculus. He claims that anyone who defends libertarian values is "out of touch". He's lucky. Nobody is going to be telling him that his words are out of place. Something else happens for the rest of us, Mr. In Touch. The point about liberty is that if you want it, everybody else has to have it also. Mr Blair's statements are not going to be censored - he is the prime minister - and says nothing which could possibly be thought of as worth censoring. It's only when you come out with ideas that someone wants to censor you. Nobody wants to censor platitudes and chumpish remarks about 'community'. 
No, it'll be the people with ideas - good and bad - who are going to be censored before the purveyors of populist gruel like Blair. Tony Blair is undertaking a classic piece of misdirection. First, he condemns the out-of-touch elite - "legal and political establishment". He then paints himself as the man to protect us from these out-of-touch elites.
Nobody could oppose this. Elites are bad, right? Of course. Then why are we having an Eton and Oxford trained barrister married to an equivalently-trained barrister who has been elected to the post of Prime Minister explaining why elites are bad. Will he then be burning his degree certificates and rescinding his membership of whichever of the Inns of Court he has a membership of, and step down as Prime Minister.
If elites are bad, then you can't exempt yourself Mr. Blair. You are undertaking in special pleading, and you aren't succeeding. You are playing a tacky game. And while the masses may not see through it, some people can and will understand it. You are the legal and political establishment, Mr Blair. You control the government, you have a fairly good stranglehold on the Legislature (who occasionally get pissy when they don't get the socialist equivalent of bread and circuses - the fox hunting ban, for instance) but barely blink when you propose the latest measure to throw away our long fought for civil liberties.
You also show no knowledge of history. When you get rid of a liberty or install some new programme, it very rarely gets reversed. The American government are finally getting round to rescinding the telephone tax, over a century after this 'temporary' measure was introduced to help fund the Spanish-American war. The American federal income tax was a similarly temporary measure.
Churchill rid us of the Soviet-style "Papers, please" society which accompanied the wartime ID cards, only for both the Labour party and the Tories to try to reintroduce it every few years. The War on Terror has provided us with many other examples of this creeping totalitarian state.
The legal and political elites may be out-of-touch with the common voter. Mr Blair is out-of-touch with reality - you know, the stuff which doesn't go away when you shut your eyes.
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