Reclaiming Freedom

FFF's new Network Manager Ted Grainger explains why he is fighting for a free future.

Fighting for a Free Future is delighted to welcome our new Network Manager, Ted Grainger! Ted joins us to build and strengthen relationships across our network of partners and allies in the battle for free markets and individual liberty.

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I must start my debut on this Substack by speaking of my delight in joining FFF and my gratitude to both Steve and Harry for bringing me on board to this important project.

Because this is an important project. Regrettably, there are only very few of us who are actively interested in cultivating the environment that is necessary for freedom to flourish, and there are even fewer of us who are prepared to dedicate their professional careers to the pursuit of it.

There are very few people who will say they do not support freedom. To be explicitly anti-freedom puts you on the echelons of the political spectrum and far outside the Overton Window. Even the most repugnant movements in the world like to style themselves as “freedom fighters”. But if everyone is truly in favour of freedom, how can it be that we are losing?

The answer, of course, is that the word itself and what freedom means in modern society can be, and certainly has been, twisted to advance whatever political agenda the politician exulting the word supports. This is not a particularly new phenomenon. As with an awful lot of political discourse that reaches Britain and Europe, it came from a cold we caught from the other side of the Atlantic. Even when governments promise freedom, they rarely follow through. When Sir Keir Starmer became Prime Minister, he promised a government that would “tread more lightly” on our lives. In other words, a freer society. I do not need to go into the details to say that we have seen nothing of the sort.

There are very few, if any, modern states in which the concept of freedom is more integrated than the US. This has meant that every cause since its foundation has had to unite itself with the concept of freedom. Even the cause of slavery, an inherently anti-freedom cause, had to proclaim itself as a movement concerned with the rights of states. This was followed by Theodore Roosevelt and the progressives defending freedom by intervening in the market to break up monopolies.

For us, though, in 2026 Britain, the biggest corruption of the word freedom that impacts us to this day took place in 1933. Once again in America, the false flag of freedom was waved by Franklin Roosevelt. This time though, he didn’t just steal the word freedom from us, he took the word liberal as well.

FDR masquerading as a liberal was able to implement an incredibly socialist state that the real liberals in America have spent all their time in the 90 years since trying to undo. He was able to create a welfare state, raise extortionate taxation, and plan large swathes of the American economy by completely reversing the claim integral to classical liberalism; he was able to convince people that the state was benevolent and would free people from the oppression of private corporations. Freedom from the state, freedom to live one’s own life in the pursuit of happiness, became freedom from capitalism.

It is this idea of freedom, FDR’s idea of freedom, which remains prevalent in Britain and much of the West today. Greedy corporations are the root of misery and poverty, and it is up to the nanny state to free us from them, and even more scarily, free us from ourselves. The state came to see freedom not as a concept to be defined internally by the individual, but one to be defined by benevolent bureaucrats and philanthropic politicians.

As classical liberals, the real liberals, the heirs to Locke and Mill, we must once and for all put an end to this bastardisation of our values. We must reclaim freedom for its true meaning. We must reclaim the value of liberty. We must reclaim the concept of liberalism. And we have to win - no alternative leaves society standing. That is why I am proud to be fighting for a free future.