Henry Porter, writing in this Sunday’s Observer, stated “A few journalists and MPs are prepared to fight the government’s sinister anti-libertarianism. More people should join them”.
Our rights and civil liberties are being eroded away, bit by bit. We live in a country with CCTV cameras pretty well everywhere in towns and cities, we are observed as we drive along motorways and other main roads, our prisons are full to bursting point and the criminal law statute book expands at an astonishing rate with each session of parliament.
Porter wrote: “How have we allowed this rolling putsch against our freedom? Where are the principled voices from left and right, the outrage of playwrights and novelists, the sit-ins, the marches, the swelling public anger? We have become a nation that tolerates a diabetic patient collapsed in a coma being tasered by police, the jailing of a silly young woman for writing her jihadist fantasies in verse and an illegal killing by police that was prosecuted under health and safety laws.”
Simon Jenkins, writing in The Sunday Times, had this to say at the start of an interesting article: “Britain is not a police state but a nation with police state tendencies. In any democracy the dictates of freedom wrestle with those of security. Britons are a liberal people who want to be safe. Do they also want to live in a condition of perpetual paranoia?”
Something to think about on a cold grey wet Monday November morning…
Charon QC 