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Peter Tatchell interviews Henry Porter |
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Friday, 19 October 2007, 18 Doughty Street.com
Labour's subversion of liberty
The Labour government is mounting one of the biggest ever peacetime
assaults on civil liberties and the right to privacy. It is undermining
the rights of the individual and strengthening the power of the state;
creating a snooping, surveillance society, and eroding the right to
protest and the presumption of innocence unless proven guilty.
Under Labour we have experienced a huge expansion in CCTV, the DNA
data-base and in covert phone and email interception. The government
plans to force us to carry national identity cards, which we will be
required to produce to get a job, buy a house, open a bank account and
to access education, health-care and welfare benefits. ID cards will
enable the state to track us from the cradle to the grave. Big Brother
will be watching you, me and all of us.
Precious hard-won freedoms, won through centuries of popular struggle
against the tyranny of absolute monarchs and corrupt parliaments, are
under attack. The ancient writ of habeas corpus, which has for hundreds
of years protected the citizen against arbitrary arrest and detention
without trial, is threatened. Already, Labour has extended to 28 days
the period that the police can hold terrorist suspects without charge.
Free speech is menaced by public order laws that are increasingly
interpreted to punish people for offending the sensibilities of others.
The right to protest can now be curtailed on the say-so of the police,
and demonstrations near parliament now require police permission seven
days in advance.
While many of these measures are being introduced for the apparently
reasonable purposes of combating crime and terrorism, some of them have
already been abused and all of them are open to serious abuse by a
future less benign government.
Peter Tatchell is the Green Party parliamentary candidate for Oxford East
PO Box 35253,
London E1 4YF
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