Programmed for control

Henry Porter was in full flow in the Observer again this past weekend.

"Rights, liberties and the liberty instinct are evaporating in this country, partly through ignorance of the historic struggle to win our freedoms - and the civilising effect this had on the world - and partly from selfishness and fear that has been remorselessly encouraged by the tabloid press. Into this gap have stepped sinister forces in the Civil Service and a government programmed to think of governance as no more than control.

We may be at the stage where we should coldly ask what is the point of personal freedom in our society? Russia has democracy without liberty and China has capitalism without democracy or liberty. Does the 21st century need to bother with the thing that tied up so much effort in the previous 250 years? Have personal freedom and rights become redundant...

Do we sacrifice the freedom to bring up children as best we can, to assembly, to protest, to free speech and privacy of communication and movement for the - unguaranteed - freedom from terror, crime and antisocial behaviour?...

Justice Secretary Jack Straw declared: 'Yes, the sun does rise in the East. And yes, we have deepened and extended civil liberties for all', sentences which should earn him a pelting with soft fruit whenever he appears in public...

Last week, the Poynter review on the loss of 25 million records from HM Revenue & Customs was published. The culprits - Gordon Brown, Dawn Primarolo MP and David Varney, the former head of the HRMC - have all moved on to other jobs, in Varney's case to the Transformational Government project that will oversee the merger of all government databases in a monstrous implement of surveillance. Forget privacy, let's just think about the appalling, and expensive, mess that this is likely to result in. And while we're about it, the waste of public funds in local government surveillance operations and CCTV systems which Detective Chief Inspector Mike Neville, Scotland Yard's CCTV expert, declared an 'utter fiasco'...

Parliament had better begin to address these issues soon or a chimpanzee living in Spain will have more rights than you and me."