David Davis is MP for Haltemprice and Howden and a former shadow home secretary. You can catch him on the conference fringe being interviewed by Steve Richards of The Independent at 8.30am on Tuesday in the Trafford Room at the Midland Hotel.
It has been not a bad year for the cause of British freedom.
In October, one year ago, the House of Lords overwhelmingly rejected the Government’s “42 day detention without charge“ policy by the largest majority in modern times. The very same day, in a humiliating climb-down, the Home Secretary announced that the plans were being dropped. In November, the courts ruled it illegal to keep the DNA of innocent people on the National DNA Database.
April saw an announcement of a review of RIPA, the snooper's charter which allowed over 600 Government agencies to misuse anti-terrorism legislation to search through our bins and spy on schoolchildren. In June, the Law Lords ruled unanimously that the use of secret evidence was a breach of human rights, a judgement that may force the Government to prosecute more terrorists using intercept evidence, rather than leaving them languishing as suspects under the “Control Order” house arrest scheme.
Meanwhile, the over-intrusive, over-expensive, over-hyped ID card scheme continues to collapse, something that will make it easy for the next Conservative government to abolish it.
Against this backdrop, the public mood on freedom issues has changed. There is widespread scepticism now about the effectiveness of the Government’s techno-authoritarianism, be it CCTV cameras, databases or biometrics. People no longer swallow the Government’s naive promises about these ideas, and as a result they make much more rational judgements about the unnecessary intrusions on their privacy, their property and their freedoms.
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