Freedom and civil liberty are fast becoming the emperor's new clothes of our time

Yesterday’s Queen’s Speech represented another nail in the coffin in of individual freedom and civil liberty in this country. The extension of detention without charge legislation, from the current 28 days to something more like 56, reared its ugly head once again as many suspected it would. It strikes me that the freedoms which our security forces are trying to defend through the prevention of terrorism are being insidiously undermined by the very instruments of that defence and that if we do not take a stand now then these freedoms will be lost irretrievably.
And it is the Liberal Democrats alone, who offer that last bastion of resistance to these reforms. Nick Clegg has already stated his willingness to resist ID cards up to and including incarceration; whilst Vince Cable, yesterday, delivered a hammer blow to the logic behind extended detention when he pointed out that not a single case has collapsed to date due to the lack of time in which police and security forces currently have to gather evidence.


Even in Scotland, the SNP have nailed their colours to the mast by stating their commitment to expanding DNA retention legislation to ensure that it is retained for those who are arrested but not charged and for those under the age of 16. At present almost 150,000 children have records in the Government’s National DNA database. What kind of a future can someone construct for themselves knowing that misdemeanours in adolescence and childhood may have a bearing on their relative innocence in the eyes of the law for the rest of their life?


On detention without charge, DNA retention and ID cards, New Labour, is seeking to out gun the Tories on right wing agendas by designing the architecture of a very different kind of Britain. A Britain in which the principle of guilty until proven innocence will be turned on its head and every last one of us will end up having to submit our bio metric data, our identities and even our genetic coding for retention and analysis in the dark vaults of Government.