“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” (Benjamin Franklin)

There is little new in the government’s policy. There is little other than people’s forgetfulness and indifference towards the experiences our predecessors had with the same policies that distinguishes the present from the past. Security in every sense may, both in the short and long term, carry a price that is never mentioned in a political programme.

Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre is clear about what is most important to him when he expresses the purpose of the Labour Party’s programme for the Norwegian people: “We want to make the most important things in people’s lives the most important things in our politics. And now giving people security for tomorrow and faith in the future – in a more troubled world – in a Norway where everyone is included.” (My emphasis.)

We live in a time of many challenges. The feeling of insecurity is among them. Not for a long time has the future seemed as indistinct as it does now. During the war, it was in fact less unclear what we were facing. The people fought to survive in freedom, with the risk that independence and democracy always entail. They did not fight for security. They fought with open eyes and great risk for the freedom to choose their own future and their own everyday lives. There was no “state authority” that could offer them either of those things. There still is not.

For millennia the people have lived and built their societies on law, justice, freedom and independence. The goal has been to pass on the inheritance in better condition than it was received. That is nation-building and development. There has been adversity and toil, challenge and struggle, but the direction has been clear. Is this an insight and understanding that people no longer possess? Or have we been lulled into a notion that there are authorities and party leaders who know better than we ourselves what interests and goals we have for our lives?

If that is the case, we need not go far back in history to find examples of nations that were misled and deceived into believing that, for their own security, they could leave it to self-appointed princes and leaders to create the security these leaders believed the people needed. In every case, it turned out to be a security that these leaders, through their own policies, themselves created the need to seek. So it remains.

What insecurity is it that Støre seeks to lift from our shoulders with his political declaration of intent? Is it not precisely the social, economic and security-policy predicament into which he himself has helped bring the Norwegian welfare state? Are he and his party’s policy of security credible when they welcome into the country more immigrants than they themselves are capable of building housing for? Is it credible that more security is created by provoking an elevated level of conflict in the High North by posing there on a warship together with the leadership of the EU, which is a belligerent party against Russia in Ukraine? Do we become safer in Norway because the war in Ukraine acquires a new “front section” in the north? Does the EU have anything at all safe and peaceful to contribute in a conflict with Russia that the Labour Party government is in the process of imposing upon us, among other things by weakening the credibility of the NATO alliance?

On Constitution Day, 17 May, we should not lose sight of the fact that what the people’s elected representatives did at Eidsvoll in 1814 was not to ask for greater security. On the contrary, it was to constitutionalise the right to independence and freedom. It is the memory of that freedom that we still celebrate, in the knowledge of how important it is, when required, to be able to sacrifice security in order to preserve the people’s enduring freedom.