Civil liberties - how far will Labour go to undermine them?

According to Geoff Hoon, Labour's new Transport Secretary, "quite a long way actually". Like all of the totalitarian control-freaks in this most hateful Labour government, he excuses state surveillance by referencing terrorism:

"If they are going to use the internet to communicate with each other and we don't have the power to deal with that, then you are giving a licence to terrorists to kill people.... The biggest civil liberty of all is not to be killed by a terrorist."

Just like with previous "anti-terror" legislation this database will, if it works - and with this government's lamentable record in IT projects, that is most unlikely, be used to "crack down" on dissident bloggers and other undesirables. Meanwhile the terrorists will encrypt their communications, use Skype and pay as you go mobile phones and continue undisturbed.

Just as Samuel Johnson pronounced that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel; I believe that using the threat of terrorism is often the first refuge of this totalitarian Labour government.

As I have said before, I lost someone in the 7/7 bombings and am definitely not "soft on terrorism" but I am not prepared to see individual liberties lost on the pretext of fighting terrorism.




I note that there is an EU angle to this story, apparently the data can currently be accessed by police on request but our subservient Labour government plans to take control of the process in order to comply with an EU directive.