Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Blair's betrayal of liberty

AC Grayling has been attacking Tony Blair's demolition of civil liberties again.

"In the early phase of the second world war, when a huge enemy army was assembled on the French coast in preparation for an invasion of the British Isles, and while the air arm of that force was daily bombing us, the British government introduced a number of temporary - note: temporary - restrictions on civil liberties, including ID cards and limitations on press freedom. Pre-war liberties were restored after the war's end. Today, in the face of far smaller, localised, intermittent threats from tiny numbers of people, the Labour government proposes to introduce permanent - note: permanent - diminutions of our civil liberties, among them ID cards ( that is, number plates for people) and storage of biometric data, with this linked to a central, national, computerised registry.

What has changed? Answer: the mentality, the quality, the intelligence, and the ethics of our political leaders."

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