Building a police state - 2

If you wanted to take a picture of a policeman, Sunday would have been a good day for it – in fact, the last good day. From now on if you photograph one of our friendly coppers, you could find yourself sent to gaol for 10 years. It’s all part of a new law presented by Labour as essential to – you’d never have guessed – the War on Terror. Oh sorry, the alleged Foreign Secretary David Miliband has told Labour MP’s they mustn’t call it that anymore.

Still, lighten up you might say, Labour would never use the law to prevent, for instance, the exposure of wrongdoing by a policeman, or to arrest a harmless tourist who didn’t understand that Britain was now a police state. Oh no? Opposition MP Damian Green had his offices searched by anti-terrorist police for exposing inconvenient truths about the Labour government, an 80 year old Auschwitz survivor who dared question Jack Straw was silenced under anti-terrorist legislation, and anti-terrorist laws have been used by police to question 7,000 trainspotters just in the North-East of England! God knows how many have been stopped over the whole country.

I could go on. No wonder even Dame Stella Rimington, former head of MI5, now thinks it’s all getting out of hand, and has protested at the way Labour is stoking up people’s fears in order to destroy our civil liberties. Mind you, our MP’s must have kicked up a hell of a stink when that “snap a bobby, go to gaol” law was going through Parliament. Funnily enough, I don’t remember hearing a peep out of them.