In The Observer foday, the usual list of suspects (Chakrabarti, Porter, Garton-Ash) have started another campaign against the "police state" they solemnly assure us we live in. This sits alongside bloggers of left and right who pronounce piously thet we live under the most repressive right-wing government this country has ever had.
Excuse me?
Starting with the first point, it is an outrageous insult to everyone who has ever lived in a genuine police state to compare the idyll of modern Britain with the hell they experienced. I am particularly disappointed in Timothy Garton-Ash whose book The File had him go through the painful process of reading his own Stasi file from when he lived in Cold War Germany and discover which of his friends had been systematically spying on him.
There is no British Gulag. Detention without trial cannot be compared to internment in NI in the 1970's. Photographing policemen is a pastime only acceptable if compiling the PC Murdoch Naughty Things to do With a Truncheon Calendar 2010.
The brutal, if unpalatable truth, is that we live in a world where there are some who wish to do us harm: they succeeded on 07/07/05; they were thwarted with the fertiliser bombs. Freedom from fear, freedom from murder, freedom from tyranny is a prize I value more than freedom to hide from CCTV cameras.
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