Another Day, Another Raid on Civil Liberties

It is clear that the government doesn’t care one jot what the Lords Constitution committee thinks about their excessive obsession with data gathering. Why else announce yet another data mining offensive?

The government is compiling a database to track and store the international travel records of millions of Britons.

Their excuse is the usual totalitarian extremist one about terrorists and illegal immigration. Curiously as a side note, Mrs L and I have been revisiting Secret Army – made back in the late seventies about the underground resistance movements in occupied Europe. The script sounded uncannily like that used by the Labour party front bench. Everyone is a terrorist because we do things like take photographs that may be useful to a terrorist, or travel and terrorists travel. We use email and terrorists like to communicate with each other using email and – god forbid – mobile telephones.

The reality is that the threat is lower now than it was when the IRA was active. We have had a couple of attacks in the past few years, one of which was successful. The response is overwhelmingly disproportionate. Any terror group wishing to undermine British society needs do nothing other than sit back, watch and smile while the government does their work for them.

Shadow home secretary Chris Grayling said: “The government seems to be building databases to track more and more of our lives.”

Given that the terrorism excuse simply doesn’t stack up when exposed to even scant scrutiny, this must be the only logical conclusion – rampant control freakery.

“The justification is always about security or personal protection. But the truth is that we have a government that just can’t be trusted over these highly sensitive issues. We must not allow ourselves to become a Big Brother society.”

Again, spot on. Where I go, who I see and what I do is none of the government’s concern. Nor, for that matter do I require their “protection” from the bogeymen. I’ll look after myself thankyou very much – and if I am to die, then so be it. That’s the risk we all take by living. I would rather take my chances in the jungle than live safe in a sterile, suffocating, controlled environment decreed by the statist extremists of the Labour party. It is not their role to protect me and I absolutely reject that protection and with it, the apparatus of surveillance. Indeed, I will, if necessary obfuscate my information wherever and whenever the opportunity arises to do so.

A spokesman for campaign group NO2ID said: “When your travel plans, who you are travelling with, where you are going to and when are being recorded you have to ask yourself just how free is this country?”

It isn’t.