The bill was characteristic of those violent times when, instead of being guided by reason, we were to be put under the dominion of wild passion, and when our pretended alarms were to be made the pretexts for destroying the first principles of the very system which we affected to revere. Every warm expression, therefore, which he had used the night before, he now upon reflection justified and repeated; and even yet, while a moment was left him, he deprecated the horror of passing the bill into a law.

What's all this? One of our noble peers debating the merits or otherwise of the government's new control orders legisation? Er.. No. It's Charles James Fox actually in May 1794 attacking the plans of William Pitt to suspend Habeas Corpus! But it just goes to prove that there is nothing new under the political sun. Check this out:

Ministers knew well the dangerous predicament in which they stood: they had weakly and, as he thought, wickedly involved the country in a most disastrous war; every day plunged them deeper and deeper in the fatality which they had brought upon their country; they saw no hopes of extricating the nation from it with honour, nor of proceeding in it with success, and they dreaded all reflection on the subject: they knew that they had no safety but in depriving the people of repose; they knew that if the alarm should be suspended for a moment, and if men were allowed time and leisure for the exercise of their understandings, the war, and the principles on which it was undertaken, would be scrutinised and discussed. They dreaded to encounter so hazardous a trial, and all their measures had been directed to keep alive an incessant commotion, so as to suspend every operation of the public intellect.

British governments getting us into dodgy wars, and then trying to change the subject?? Thank God that would never happen today.

But his main theme was liberty and its place in Britain's constitution. How's this for a liberal manifesto:

If the love of liberty was not to be maintained in England; if the warm admiration of it was not to be cherished in the hearts of the people; if the maintenance of liberty was not to be inculcated as a duty; if it was not to be reverenced as our chief good, as our boast and pride and richest inheritance; – what else had we worthy of our care? Liberty was the essence of the British constitution. King, lords, commons and courts of judicature were but the forms; the basis of the constitution was liberty, that grand and beautiful fabric, the first principle of which was government by law, and which this day they were going to suspend

He goes on..

Let us demonstrate to every man the blessings of our system. Let us show that we not only are convinced that it is good, but that it will bear to be examined and compared with any other system. Let us make the people proud to court comparison, and strive rather to add new blessings to those they enjoy than to abridge those which they already possess.

And he had a lot to say about the tactics in the war on terror..

Persecution had never been successful in extirpating opposition to any system either religious or civil...The human mind was roused by oppression; and so far from yielding to persecution, exerted all its energies in consequence of the attacks it had to encounter.

I think his conclusion could have come from any of the dissenting peers yesterday..

Mr Fox concluded with a strong admonition to the House on the present alarming measure. He said he saw it was to pass; that further effort was vain; that the precipitation with which it had been hurried on made it idle for him to hope that argument would induce them to hesitate; and all that remained for him was to pronounce his solemn protest against a measure pregnant with consequences so fatal to the established order and strength and freedom of the country.