It was with something akin to delight that I saw the Times, not a newspaper overly concerned with civil liberties, have on its front page* an article about objections to Britain's developing surveillance state.

This is modern Britain

If we cannot get these issues out in the open, we will indeed see Britain 'sleepwalking' into what may some time in the future be a panoptic nightmare. Blair or Howard are not going to be having the security services doing 'midnight knocks' on the doors of those they disfavour (well, maybe for a few people in the Finsbury Park area) but make no mistake about it, the infrastructure of repression is being put in place at an astonishing rate and someday (hopefully long after I have decamped to New Hampshire) this information is going to be used by statists of both left and right with fewer qualms than Tony Blair to order every single aspect of people's lives in Britain in ways that places the state at the centre of everything you do in ways earlier totalitarianisms could only dream of... for your own good, of course.

We have a serious battle to win and the more these issues are out of the committee rooms and in the more general public arena, the better we can argue the case for resisting the emerging Panopticon State.

When the state watches you, dare to stare back

* = Readers outside the UK may have difficulties accessing this link once it is archived due to the benighted policies of the Times newspaper.