For thirty years I have been travelling to unfree places, from East Germany to Burma, and writing about them in the belief that I was coming from one of the freest countries in the world: Britain. I wanted people in those places to enjoy more of what we had. In the last few years, I have woken up – late in the day, but better late than never – to the way in which individual liberty, privacy and human rights have been sliced away in Britain, like salami, under New Labour governments that profess to find in liberty the central theme of British history.

I know I've used this before, but 1100 riot police were deployed on the occasion of Sarkozy's visit with Gordon Brown to Arsenal football stadium, allegedly and coincidentally as part of a never-repeated exercise to find 'mobile phone thieves'. Here you can see them marching in formation towards Finsbury Park Mosque. 20 stolen mobiles were found. John Kelly

‘Oh, these powers will almost never be used,’ they say every time. ‘Ordinary people have nothing to fear. It affects just 0.1 per cent.’ But a hundred times 0.1 per cent is 10 per cent. The East Germans are now more free than we British are, at least in terms of law and administrative practice in such areas as surveillance and data collection. Thirty years ago, they had the Stasi. Today, Britain has such broadly drawn and elastic surveillance laws that the local council of a small town called Poole could exploit them to spend two weeks spying on a family wrongly accused of lying on a school application form. The official spies reportedly made copious notes on the movements of the mother and her three children, whom they referred to as ‘targets’, and watched the family home at night to establish where they were sleeping. And this is supposed to be England?

Though the Stasi headline is irresistible, such Stasi-nark methods do not yet make a Stasi state. The political context is very different. We British don’t live in a one-party dictatorship. But nor is this just ‘an isolated case’, as ministers always protest. Almost every week brings some new revelation of the way in which our government has taken a further small slice of our liberty, always in the name of another real or alleged good: national security, safety from crime, community cohesion, efficiency (ha ha), or our ‘special relationship’ with the United States.

Liberty comes last. As the conservative author Dominic Raab writes in his excellent book The Assault on Liberty, this government ‘has hyperactively produced more Home Office legislation than all the other governments in our history combined, accumulating a vast arsenal of new legal powers and creating more than three thousand additional criminal offences’.

Other free countries, including the United States, have over-reacted to the threat of terrorism, violating their own basic constitutional principles and legal standards. The peculiarity of Britain is that we have nibbled away individual liberty on so many different fronts. We have been complicit in American-led torture of our own people; at the same time we have eroded free speech in ways unthinkable in the United States; and we have become what Privacy International calls ‘an endemic surveillance society’.

Yes, fighting terrorism requires some restrictions. Yes, you can make a crime-reduction case for some CCTV. But we have more CCTV and a larger DNA database, a more ambitious, and unworkable, National Identity Register scheme, more police powers and more email snooping than any comparable liberal democracy. Added to which we have a bureaucracy so centralised and incompetent in managing this mass of data that it lost a computer disc with the child benefit details of 25 million people.

What’s more, the certain loss of liberty will often not result in the alleged gain in security or efficiency. So, for example, PM Gordon Brown and other ministers continued to press for 42 days detention without trial, despite the fact that two former heads of the Security Service, the Director of Public Prosecutions, the former Lord Chancellor, Attorney General and Lord Chief Justice – in short, almost everyone in a position to know – said it was wrong, unnecessary and counter-productive. How can a government of intelligent and often personally liberal-minded persons behave so illiberally, arrogantly and stupidly? What screw have they got loose? What nerve is missing?

The fightback has begun, led by three groups: judges and lawyers; unelected peers (witness, most recently, an outstanding House of Lords report on surveillance); and a rainbow coalition of journalists, academics, writers, artists, think tankers, civil society activists and simply citizens, of left and right, young and old, some of whom have now joined together to launch next week, in several British cities, a Convention on Modern Liberty (http://www.modernliberty.net/. See the following Modern Liberty video, which argues that the UK was complicit in torture, rendition and secret prisons.

Notably absent from this list is the one group who should be in the front line when it comes to the defence of British liberties: our elected representatives. This is not just a New Labour failing. With a few notable exceptions, such as the former Conservative home affairs spokesman David Davis, most MPs have been complaisant and pusillanimous beyond belief. For example, last week the Home Secretary (Britain’s interior minister) idiotically banned Dutch MP Geert Wilders from entering Britain to show his noxious and offensive anti-Islam film at the invitation of members of the House of Lords. Result: a curtailment of free speech that gave Wilders more free publicity than he could otherwise have dreamed of. ‘Liberal’ Democrat Home Affairs spokesman Chris Huhne agreed with the decision on the grounds that the film is really offensive. I shall need some convincing that the Conservative front bench are going to be any better.

I’m not sure I fully understand all the reasons for this cravenness, but here’s one. A couple of years ago, I asked a very senior New Labour politician if his government had not got the balance between security and liberty wrong. ‘Well’, he replied, ‘one thing I can tell you is that if you ask the British people they will always choose more security’. And this is where the ball comes back to us. Since our leaders are now mainly followers – following the latest opinion poll, focus group or newspaper campaign – it’s up to us, the British people, to change their view of what ‘the people’ want.

Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies at Oxford University, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of Free World. A longer version of Tim’s piece appeared in the Guardian.

I'm not a top copper, but the giveway clue in this advertisement from Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick's undercover limo service might have been 'police officers at the wheel'. In itself, this is an unenticing, unless the newly-weds wish to be driven at high speed, dragged from the vehicle with a blanket over their heads and bundled up the aisle by ex Plod. Good for shotgun weddings, I suppose.

The story of Bob Quick’s (wife’s) sideline business hiring luxury executive cars, run from the family home has now been well-documented. The unwise and slanderous outburst from Quick, who accused the Tories, and Shadow Home Office Minister Dominic Grieve in particular, of ‘corruption’, of endangering his family safety and undermining the Police enquiry into the earlier Home Office leaks is now common knowledge. His subsequent ‘grovelling apology’ to Cameron and the Tories is now also in the public domain. Silobreaker is the most comprehensive source.

I’m (clearly) not a copper, but it appears that Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick may have compromised the integrity and impartiality of the ‘enquiry’ which he is leading by his rash slander of the party and parties accused by Labour (Thus passim) of encouraging Home Office leaks of allegedly sensitive immigration data which led to the dramatic arrest of a top Tory. On this basis alone, he should resign as head of the enquiry and pass the job along to another department or (preferably) another police force entirely. 

One way to discredit and spin an investigation which might severely embarrass the government is to throw a large spanner into the spokes of the enquiry, add a spice of ‘Terror’ and hope that the resulting muck and bullets will smear everyone, especially if it is timed for the festive season, when not much news reporting happens. A version of this tactic may have been at play here. Bob Quick may have blindly lashed out at what he considered a mischievous attack by the Tory-favouring Mail on Sunday, but history shows that this influential right wing middle class tabloid has been used to great effect in the past by elements of New Labour, especially when there is a ‘Terrorist threat’ angle to the story.

Silobreaker networking image puts Quick in the middle and terrorism on the extreme edge

All this is largely irrelevant, since we already know the ‘outcome’ of this enquiry by the Met Police into the Met Police. We will hear that the Police acted completely independently of the government. Even though the Home Secretary and Prime Minister were informed of the raid on Damian Green’s parliamentary office and had it in their power to mitigate or halt the breach of parliamentary privilege that occurred, they ‘chose not to’ since to do so would compromise the ‘integrity and independence’ of the Police. The leaks, we will be told, were and are too sensitive to be revealed to the public and possibly exposed the entire nation to Terror on a massive scale. It will be conceded that neither David Cameron, Dominic Grieve nor Damian Green actively conspired to encourage the junior Home Office civil servant to leak information, but it will be acknowledged that he had an ulterior motive in so doing – to curry favour with the Conservatives. 

What possibly won’t be acknowledged is that the Police acted disingenuously in searching Green’s offices without a warrant, that it is possible that covert surveillance techniques were used which may have required authorisation from the Home office, that Jacqui Smith and the leaky Immigration Office department had prima facie motive for suppressing information relating to a breakdown of information relating to the number and whereabouts of illegal and overstayed immigrants, some of whom may be nationals of countries with whom Britain has a parlous diplomatic relationship (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia, for example). Neither will it be acknowledged that Gordon Brown and his advisors, principally Mandelson, had no right or justification to publicly intimate on national public media that the Leader of the Opposition and his Front Bench played an active role in colluding to leak information of this nature.

Nobody will be prosecuted (Scotland Yard have already conceded as much). Nobody will be brought to book. Bob Quick wedding car hire will operate from another premises (and frankly why not – good luck to him and his wife) – unless unkind – and possibly jealous – ‘sources in the Metropolitan Police’ leak his new address too. Please prove me wrong. And tell me I’m not a Tory. I’m not. I’m not. I’m not. I’m fed up of defending the poor lambs. But independent or not, I wouldn’t fancy my chances when they sweep to power, Superintendent Quick, so I’d keep the car hire business ticking over.

Gordon Brown looking sad in Helmand. 'This is paradise compared to Brussels'

We heard this morning that UK Gordon Brown has broken off his constructive discussions with EU leaders to appear in Afghanistan to mourn the death of four British soldiers, killed in two bomb incidents, one where a 13 year old suicide bomber killed 3 Royal Marines. We also heard that yesterday’s government announcement that UK knife crime had plunged by 14 per cent in a month was based on fraudulent statistics and that the ‘decision’ to withdraw the remaining 3000 British troops in Iraq was leaked to the press but not announced to Parliament (therefore might not happen). We heard that the jury in the de Menezes inquest returned an ‘open verdict,’ having been barred by the coroner to return a verdict of Unlawful Killing, but had rejected the mendacious accounts of the Metropolitan Police murder squad. We heard, we heard . . .

Head shot of Cressida Dick of the Met SO13 Shoot to Kill team. Scary name, scary hair, scary job in an institutionally racist, sexist force with no real accountability. Just plain scary, in fact. Dumb dumb bullets all round.

We heard former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, break his (unusually protracted) silence to state that he sincerely hoped this setback would not affect the promotion prospects of Cressida Dick, the Calamity Jane in charge of the Operation Kratos SO13 Licence to Kill gang. Last Thursday we heard of a foiled Al Quaeda plot in Belgium to allegedly blow up the EU Ministers gathered this weekend, a potentially huge outrage, but, mysteriously, having categorically stated that the target was Gordon Brown, the UK press have subsequently virtually ignored the story (including omitting to mention that 8 of the 14 suspects have been already released). The international press had no such emphasis on Gordon Brown. Apart from signalling the return to full fighting form of spinmeisters Mandelson and Campbell, all this whirling might mean that Brown intends to ease out of Iraq with a diplomatic cough (‘mission accomplished?’) but almost certainly ‘redeploy’ the troops to Afghanistan. On the basis that the War on Terror is continuing to pose clear and present danger to the UK we can expect continued pressure to proceed with the Identity Cards project and lots more sirens in the middle of the night to keep us in a state of fearful preparedness for – a UK general election. While in Afghanistan, Brown pledged a whopping £6 million to ensure free and fair elections (less than the cost of a Mayfair townhouse for an Afghan warlord) but nearer to home, the Tories are applying pressure for an early election. In the fog of war, we seem to forget that the glorious leader of the free world was not himself elected by the UK populace.

John J. Kelly

PS. THUS POLICY STATEMENT. My new policy is to byline opinion pieces (most of THUS falls into this category) since it is counter to free speech to hide behind anonymity when making speculative comment. We try to attribute sources wherever possible, hence the plethora of references to sources in the public domain but it’s mostly just me spoofing around acting the giddy goat. Believe nothing, believe me.

by John J Kelly

The government’s bailout plan for threadbare foreign technology and data collection corporations is gathering pace, despite the fact that like Iraq, the Dome or the Special Relationship, the majority can’t see the point of the drastic plastic Identity Card project and doubts that any good will come of it. But the UK government is determined to finish what it started – the Balkanisation of civil liberties and UK Plc. (in Administration). Apologies if I’m sounding a tad Monday morning, but I’ve just noticed that the overwhelming majority of the (estimated) £19 billion of UK taxpayers’ money earmarked for this flawed project will be spent on contractors such as EDS (Ross Perot’s liberal US behemoth) , IBM (US company who needs no introduction), Siemens (Germany), Fujitsu (the only Japanese company daft enough to buy ICL), Thales (a French water company) and a carpetbag of ‘international’ consultants (I’m only guessing, but CapGemini (Fr) surely loom large). We all know that the costs will balloon (even more), the project will have deadly security flaws and these foreign companies will repatriate our cash while remaining embedded in our national security in a deadly embrace. In a bizarre turn – file under ‘you couldn’t make it up’ – Jacqui Smith’s Home Office is seeking special powers to search the homes of UK employees of these companies for the next 20 years without recourse to search warrants (in the event of theft or, more likely, sensitive policy leaks). Yet we are told that there is absolutely no danger in assembling this database.

We already know that the government’s (largely outsourced) security vetting procedures led to up to 5000 illegal immigrants working in government departments. We suspect that the Damian Green farrago (Thus passim) has a lot to do with pathetic attempts to stymie more embarrassing leaks of that nature. But we need more police and government control over our lives. Not on my street we don’t. We’ve already got a hatful.

London, May 2008. Nearly 600 police in riot gear goosestepped up MY road scaring off Muslims and showing off their helmets when Brown showed Sarkozy and Carla round the Emirates Stadium, before I'd even started publishing THUS. This is not a fake picture.

Today, Gordon Brown is meeting a coalition of willing idiots (Sarkozy and Barroso, but not the sensible Mrs Merkel, leader of Europe’s largest economy) to tell them how to rescue their economies by charging banks 12% interest and expecting them to lend below Libor to bust businesses. (Those German fools are charging less than 5% interest to their desperate banks – next thing they’ll be manufacturing stuff to SELL to people for MONEY instead of playing Monopoly). Presumably his advice to Sarkozy will be to buy more British utilities with semi-nationalised French state utilities and take over our infrastructure completely. Mr Barroso needs to send us more immigrants to exploit from newly-initiated member states.

The EIB is suddenly to blame

Brown has apparently just woken up to the fact that the European Investment Bank (EIB) was set up to advance development loans to European businesses, and has EU cash available to do exactly that. When the Euro was weak against Sterling, UK banks made it difficult for small and medium sized businesses to take advantage of EIB loans at preferential rates (preferring to lend at rates preferential to themselves, of course). Some estimate that up to £4 billion per year in qualifying loans for UK companies went unclaimed for several years. It is risible that the UK government is now trying to blame the EU at the same time as claiming leadership in the credit crisis, but entirely consistent with the policy of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted (then shooting the stableboy, especially if he’s European).

Meanwhile, we’ll maintain the pretence of British independence by doing whatever the US, a busted flush tells us to do. It’s Monday morning and I’m grumpy, but last week the European Court condemned Britain’s illegal DNA database (THUS passim). Gordon Brown could reduce the national debt by several billion by putting the hated identity card scheme on hold and he could stop pretending that spending vast amounts scrubbing the decks of the Titanic with (foreign) toothbrushes is likely to work. Talk to the Germans, Gordon. They have some experience of economic reconstruction. It tends to involve a degree of hard work, readjustment to economic realities and (in the case of the former GDR) dismantling the wasteful and corrupting apparatus of the police state.

Leaving aside that fact that we’ve heard this particular stuff many times before, if true, might it have something to do with my earlier post, pointing out that the government have told most of us, and the police in particular, that the mussel-man is our deadliest enemy, intent on creating a Sharia caliphate and blowing us all up with shoes, aftershave and fertiliser? As if to prove my point, the same programme carried a piece ten minutes earlier telling us ‘ the head of the CIA has given a sobering assessment of the global threat posed by al-Qaeda.’ Well shave my beard and call me normal: who’d have thought the CIA would say THAT?

I for one am enthusiastic about a diverse and colourful law enforcement agency. Short of Batman or RoboCop, I think we should fund a study into the feasibility of recruiting large numbers of Pikeys, or, to give them a more politically correct term, travelling men, into the police force. Many, if not all of them, are persuasive disciplinarians who excel in the martial arts. They would lend the police much-needed insight as to the underworld trade in car batteries, dognapping, tarmac scams and horses tethered on traffic islands. Unlike our increasingly unfit and unthreatening plod, Pikey Cop would definitely rip through a crowd of late night revellers going wild in a market town and persuade them to be on their way, as this clip of Pikeys fighting demonstrates. As Mr Coyle says: ‘we’ve got the name of blackguards and slags, but we’re nice fucking people.’ Who would disagree? I for one would also like to see more Hasidic police. One way of enabling this would be to relax the rules on headgear and allow them to wear those large furry hats, armoured if necessary. For that matter, Muslim police should be allowed to wear lowslung Ali Baba baggy trousers. Muslim policewomen (not many calls for them from the Muslim police blokes, I note) should be permitted to wear Chadors and walk a few paces behind their partners on the rare occasions when they are called to patrol the streets. There is a precedent: Sikhs are allowed to wear turbans. For that matter, why don’t we employ more Ghurkha police. If challenged, they are apparently obliged to lop off their opponent’s testicles with their fearsome Khukri blades. ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime would take on a whole new context’ if some or all of my proposals were adopted. Let’s call for a study and await the long-anticipated report . . .