This excellent piece by Ian Bell (h/t NO2ID Newsblog) is worth a read. Bell compares the threats to our society with those of the past, from wartime when liberty was curtailed and subsequently replaced in peacetime, through the IRA years when the Labour party deplored the Prevention of Terrorism Act as an “abomination, the antithesis of the rule of law”. The same party that was opposed to identity cards, I recall. He reminds us of that noxious thug Reid and his “reasoning” for this assault on our liberty:
Why? Because Dr Reid says so, for reasons Dr Reid is unwilling to explain. The threat is vast, he says, and unremitting. It would chill your blood to know what John Reid knows. But Reid, departing a great office of state with all the grace he has brought to the position, will not tell you what he knows. Trust him on that.
I wouldn’t trust that foul, faeces ridden arsehole further than I could kick him and that would be stretching it. The man is deserving of no trust whatsoever and he gets none from me. I despise him and everything he represents; Stalinism. He is the embodiment of all that is evil in that philosophy.
Bell makes an excellent point along the way, that draconian measures merely create more of the chaos they are supposed to counteract.
When Blair takes another bite from our liberties in the pages of a Murdoch paper, therefore, take it as guaranteed: another couple of dozen young Muslim men have just had their paranoia confirmed. As a consequence, another Tube train is at risk. Iraq may have become a kind of virtual conflict, a theoretical construct droning away as a sub-text to the nightly news, a cause for arguments and an excuse for rhetoric. It is, still, a small country, far away, of which, inexcusably, we know little. This assault is different.
And yet there is no justification for it. This is not a country in wartime – to compare the current threat with WWII is ludicrous in the extreme. The immediate threat to individuals carrying out their daily business is less now than thirty years ago when IRA active service units were at large, bombing British cities. There is no justification for these assaults on our liberties outside the paranoid and power hungry imaginations of fevered politicians seeking to make a name for themselves.
Are we under threat? Probably. Are we more safe, thanks to our implacable new Labour guardians? I doubt it. Are notions of rights and due process at risk? Unquestionably. Are we losing sight of the freedoms we claim to live by?
I fear so. No hyperbole: I fear.
A dark note to finish the piece. It is one with which I have to reluctantly concur.