Vote: is Britain becoming a police state?

Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, has accused the Government of exploiting people’s fear of terrorism to restrict civil rights.

Ministers risked handing a victory to terrorists who want people to “live in fear and under a police state”, said the former spy, who retired as Director General of the Security Service in 1996.

Dame Stella, 73, has been a harsh critic of the Government’s policies, including attempts to extend pre-charge detention for terror suspects to 42 days and its controversial ID cards plan.

“Since I have retired I feel more at liberty to be against certain decisions of the Government, especially the attempt to pass laws which interfere with people’s privacy,” said Dame Stella, in an interview with the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia.

“It would be better that the Government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, which is precisely one of the objects of terrorism: that we live in fear and under a police state.”

Dame Stella said that America was even more to blame and had acted as a recruiting sergeant for extremists, through harsh anti-terror measures that have been accused of breaching human rights law.

“The US has gone too far with Guantanamo and the tortures. MI5 does not do that," she said.

“Furthermore, it has achieved the opposite effect: there are more and more suicide terrorists finding a greater justification.”

A report by a panel of leading judges and lawyers, published yesterday, appeared to confirm Dame Stella's view, warning that measures to tackle terrorism have undermined international human rights laws.

The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) found that “many states have fallen into a trap set by terrorists”, by introducing anti-terrorism measures which undermined the very values they sought to protect. Many such measures were imposed on a temporary basis but ended up becoming permanent features of law and practice, it said. It condemned the use of torture, disappearances, and arbitrary and secret detention.

Dame Stella's criticism was seized upon by the Conservatives. David Davis, the Tory MP and former shadow home secretary, said: "Like so many of those who have had involvement in the battle against terrorism, Stella Rimington cares deeply about our historic rights and rightly raises the alarm about a Government whose first interest appears to be to use the threat of terrorism to frighten people and undermine those rights rather than defend them."

Brian Eno, the musician turned activist who will speak at the Convention on Modern Liberty later this month, said that Dame Stella was right.: "When the government passed its 'anti-terror' laws, it reassured those who campaigned against them that they would only ever be used in the most extreme circumstances," said Eno.

"Within a couple of years they had been used to eject an 80-year-old heckler from a Labour Party Conference, to arrest a woman for reading out the names of British soldiers killed in Iraq, and to freeze the assets of Icelandic banks in England. This is the problem with vague legislation of this type: it invariably gets called into use whenever anybody does anything that the government finds embarrassing or the police find inconvenient."

A Home Office spokesman defended the Government's record, saying: “The Government has been clear that, where surveillance or data collection will impact on privacy, they should only be used where it is necessary and proportionate."

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