The right to free movement

Take a read of this, it is yet another move from this Labour Government to move us towards becoming a police state. The "Home Office ... gives some early indications of who, other than suspected terrorists and international criminals, will be on the British no-fly list and be banned from travelling to and from the country. It floats the idea that provisions should be introduced to ban travel overseas for the tens of thousands of offenders who have not paid outstanding court fines or failed to discharge confiscation orders made against them. Although no official estimate exists of the number of people who have to pay court fines the amount they owe has now reached a record £487m, with a further £300m in unpaid confiscation orders." All this travel data will go into a database that will in the future be linked to the NIR. So what could they use this data for? They will start with the unobjectionable - stopping people leaving the country to avoid a court case or whilst on bail, they will move to the hard to object - stopping people leaving the country who owe court imposed fines, move on to the trickier - stopping people from leaving the country who have unpaid parking tickets or haven't paid the BBC licence fee. From there is is not a huge jump to imagine people being prevented from leaving the country to go on holiday because they have: flown already this year and not offset the carbon yet, or have a doctor's appointment during the period they are planned to be abroad, or who have failed to separate their rubbish correctly on more than 3 occasions in the current financial year, or who have not lost the amount of weight that their doctor had advised them to, or who were late in submitting their tax return for the last tax year, or who have library books that have not been returned yet and would become overdue whilst they are away, or who have contributed to non-Government approved blogs, or who voted for an unapproved party at the last election, or who voted for a party other than that of our Glorious Leader in the last election, or who have missed the Two Minutes Hate too many times this year, or who have committed a ThoughtCrime ...

It is a slippery slope that we are embarking on and who can say that I am exaggerating the possibilities?