Use it or lose it

We are becoming a totalitarian state by stealth and I suspect within the lifetime of my children and certainly in the time of their children there will be people battling for the rights and freedoms we are watching vanish as we stand idly by.

Anti terror legislation comes in and within days any jumped up little jobsworth with a badge and an official scrap of paper is using it to spy on ordinary people doing ordinary things and minding their own business.

Claiming that checks to see if someone is telling porkies about where they live to register their kids in a better school somehow equates to terror threats to blow up Parliament or a repeat of 9/11 seems to be a rather obscene perversion of what we were told the reason for these powers was in the first place. If we are honest it is also rather an insult to the memory of all those who have died in terror attacks.

Some 800 or so bodies can use these powers apparently which either shows a level of drafting one would expect from a dyslexic chimpanzee or a total disregard for the rights of the individual.

We now discover councils are secretly sending the contents of your dustbin to be analysed to see what you are throwing away. All being done anonymously claims the leader of one of the councils concerned - anonymous of course, apart from anything in your rubbish which contains a name and address or anything to identify you and anonymous in that no one asked the householders concerned if they minded. It is another example of officialdom and the state showing a breathtaking disregard for the people they are supposed to represent and, in the case of officials, their ultimate employers.

A similar study could of course be carried out if everyone were to help out by taking their rubbish and dumping it on the town hall steps.

Next up under the guise of more terror legislation is the 42 day detention malarkey. If terror laws can be used to check cohabitation or getting a child into a school what worthwhile guarantees are we ever going to have - which rules out anything a politician says - on how six weeks jail without even a charge let alone a trial will be used in the future.

The state has already shown that if it thinks it can get away with it, it will.