Results tagged “David Davis” from Birmingham Mail - Is It Just Me

When I wrote earlier this week that during my children's lifetime people would be fighting for the rights and freedoms we are meekly surrendering on an almost daily basis I was not expecting it to happen within 24 hours and for the fight to be led by a politician

Whether any hidden motives emerge remains to be seen but for the time being David Davis deserves our full support if for no other reason it will force people to stop watching Big Brother and realise they are actually living it - all with one CCTV camera for every 14 people to keep an eye on things.

The 42 day detention without charge or trial is just the catalyst which appears to have tipped Mr Davis over the edge. We have the biggest DNA data base in the world, with most people on it totally innocent, and, as Mr Davis has already pointed out, a proposed ID card system which will carry more information than even the KGB and Stasi in their darkest days ever held on their citizens. All that information, along with even the most intimate medical details on the NHS system - if it ever gets off the ground - will then be available to the most obscure state employee for the flimsiest of reasons.

The only saving grace is that with this Government's record on anything involving computers the current population will be long dead before even the most basic system is limping into operation at the cost of scores of billions of pounds. More worrying, given their record of losing data, is that most of our personal details will be in the hands of criminals, terrorists and probably even on the Internet long before the first ID card is issued.

We have seen people arrested at the Cenotaph and charged under terror legislation for reading out the names of British soldiers killed in Iraq. We have seen a pensioner, a survivor of the Holocaust, dragged out of a Labour Party conference, again under anti-terror legislation, for a show of disapproval in a speech by the foreign secretary - for disagree read arrest.

We have race and religious laws that stifle free speech and free expression and, before the rent-a-conscience liberals splutter into their cornflakes, they should remember that freedom of speech is only worth anything when people are allowed the freedom to say things you disagree with. There were plenty of existing laws from breach of the peace to incitement that were available but they would not have given the same sweeping powers to state and police - or appeased certain sections of the populus.

We have stood by while laws were passed to allow a whole host of jumped up officials the right to enter our properties without permission, search every room and take photographs of whatever they like for assessment of council tax or whatever other reason they can think of and the same 800 of so public bodies are using anti-terror legislation for general snooping on the population, fishing for the most trivial of offences.

On top of all that we have extradition to the USA, for example, if the US authorities ask for it without them first having to prove a prima facie case in court - effectively giving up our citizens to a foreign power virtually without a fight. Then within the newly formed Ministry of Justice, a name somehow very anti-British, redolent of Kafka and a totalitarian state, we have threats to jury trials and even the presumption of innocence.

The irony is that while the state gives itself more and more power over our lives it is giving away its own powers to the unelected figures who run the EU in the shadowy world they inhabit in Brussels.

With the Liberal Democrats not putting up a candidate and Labour struggling to beat an egg when it comes to elections Mr Davis might well find himself with a free run with plenty of column inches and air time to express his views. Whatever people think of his politics, his party or politicians in general we should at least be grateful that he is forcing people to wake up and see what is being done, in their name, to their basic freedoms. Maybe the fight back might just be beginning.