[coldradiohead]

I would like to know whether anyone has an opinion on whether the new labour government (ie Brown and Blair)have eroded and attacked our liberties.

Personally I feel that we are really under attack from the state. We have more CCTV cameras in the UK than any other state. We are having more laws passed every month than anywhere else I know. We have a surveillance, Orwellian society. Massive numbers of "anti-terrorism" laws are been passed or planned such as the right to hold a suspected terrorist for weeks on end without charge. This seems ridicoulous. Our free speech is been attacked also. And last but not least they are still persisitng with giving us all ID cards. This was something we last had during WW2, wasnt it.

I would love to know what anyone else thinks.

[Mazhi]

I think liberties are important and that many countries are infringing upon human freedoms in the name of counter-terrorism. This is not the correct way to fight against terrorism. You have to deal with problems at their root, not change the society into an authoritarian one because that won't help.

[DDave3]

have eroded and attacked our liberties.

Without doubt. There is no doubt in my mind that the British government are excessively curbing our positive liberty in the name of counter terrorism. This has lead to an excuse for authoritarian policies, the result is the paradoxical situation where people are oppressed or surveyed in the name of freedom. Over the last decade Britain has erred far too much on the side of security. In fact, that is to understate the error; we have probably diminished our own security by overreacting, alienating some who might otherwise not have been alienated - while at the same time building up the most extensive public and private surveillance society around.

We have more CCTV cameras in the UK than any other state

I don't immediately see this as a crucial problem. There is a line of argument that says increased surveillance will enhance your personal freedom. A relatively unknown fact is that the explosion in CCTV can be traced back originally to 1993, a time when Britain was under a Tory Government. After the murder of the boy James Burgler, Michael Howard, then Home Secretary, iniatated the 'City Challenge Competition' to allocate millions of pounds of government funds for the development of CCTV systems.

The vast majority of CCTV is privately owned and operated, and nothing to do with Governments, Labour or Tory. The increase is to do with how the public perceive the world and not because the government makes them install cameras. If you look at where CCTVs are often installed, it is usually the case they are installed by local councils from the demand from residents, and not actually council policy.

Where I have my real concern with is the lack of empirical evidence to suggest that they are at all effective. A quote from a Guardian Comment article:

An alarming new report, the first official joint government and police assessment of our national CCTV strategy, has drifted into the public domain largely unnoticed. It finds that more than 80% of cameras produce images of such poor quality that they are of no use for detection purposes, and that the majority were positioned in the wrong places. The report also highlighted that there are no statutory safeguards on CCTV and that, because anyone is able to set up a network, the authorities have no accurate figure on how many are in operation.

Perhaps the most significant thing about this report is that it exists at all. In a country with at least 4.2m cameras, one for every 14 people, estimated to comprise 20% of the world's allocation, where the Home Office spent 78% of its crime prevention budget on installing these systems in the 1990s, and has invested £500m of public money in CCTV over the last decade, the lack of authoritative research into the efficacy of surveillance is troubling.

[Quercus Robur]

have eroded and attacked our liberties.

the human right act was nice of them it shot a hole through the detention provisions of their own prevention of terrorism act (or was it the anti-terrorism crime and security act) basically by implementing the rights in the european convention at strasbourg into our law and when our laws contravene the Convention standard they can either radically reinterpret the law so that it conforms, or issue a declaration of incompatability which is rather embarrassing (but not legaly binding). Also our public authorities are bound to act compatibly with our human rights now!

I feel that we are really under attack from the state.

hehe I wonder what it would be like to be really under attack from the state - e.g. I was living in China now and I was a pro-democracy tibetan nationalist - I'm not sure I'd be talking happily about it on the internet in the comfort of my own home