WE ARE DOOMED to death and destruction at the hand of terrorists unless we give the State more powers. Well, that’s what the Government claims.

So we’ll have to carry ID cards that feed into pooled databases capable of tracking our every transaction. Internet service providers will be required to keep copies of every e-mail just in case the State wants to read what we have been writing. Plus the Government wants to prosecute people for saying pretty much anything it disapproves of. Of course we are assured that these powers will only be used against “bad people”. But laws brought in for one reason always, and I do mean always, end up being used against altogether different types of people.

The Government uses a false dichotomy that liberty and security have to be traded off against each other. But you can indeed have both life and liberty. The freedom to express yourself short of inciting violence does not threaten security but bolsters it: I want to know exactly who my enemies are by reading their freely spoken words. And when they cross the line and incite people to terrorism, I want the Government to do the one thing with my tax money of which I approve: protect me from these nutters by throwing them in jail or out of the country.

Yet far from protecting my life and liberty, the Government just threatens to push the problem further underground by trying to stop people saying what they think or freely associating with whom they wish and then brazenly lying about why it needs these extra powers. For example, first ID cards are held up as an indispensable tool to fight terrorism, yet when he was asked how an ID card would have stopped a single suicide bomber from committing mass murder, the Home Secretary admitted it was not a tool against terrorism and please forget we ever said it was.

The Government does not need more powers. It can use existing laws to prosecute those who wish to harm us and undo a few of the more absurd changes to the law which prevent it from doing so (such as the bizarre Human Rights Act). Common law is more than robust enough to deal with demented clerics, so whenever you hear Tony Blair claiming he needs extra powers, you can be sure than you are not getting the real story of why that is.

Perry de Havilland is editor of Samizdata.net