Civil liberties

It's rather ironic that we are celebrating the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade while the UK's most illiberal government since 1945 is busily finding more and more and more ways of eroding our freedom - CCTV, ID cards, road congestion charging, genetic profiling, detention without trial, abolition of juries and, most recently, a proposal to allow the police to fingerprint anyone they suspect of breaking the law.

Of course, the argument is that these measures help to deter crime and catch criminals and that honest citizens have nothing to fear. However, that's only so long as we have a government which, despite being so illiberal by historical UK standards, is still more liberal than many foreign governments. There is a fear that these measures could be used by future governments to control dissent and suppress legitimate opposition. The road congestion proposal, for example, would enable the Government to track motorists. It would give liberal governments more information than they need and give illiberal governments more information than we should trust them with.