Labour's Surveillance Society

1.34.21pm GMT Tue 9th Dec 2008

Dear Sir,

Earlier this year the Evening Post reported how Councils such as Bristol were selling on the personal details of residents who are on the electoral roll. Now the Government has unveiled plans for a giant database that would store details of all mobile phone and internet traffic.

After the repeated instances of laptops, CDs and memory sticks containing personal data being lost or stolen there is no reason to believe that the Government should be trusted with this new information.

The Home Secretary claims it is designed to tackle terrorism, (the same justification she uses for the £6 billion ID card scheme when extra police on the street would more effective), but handing over so much information to the state is deeply worrying.

The Government's intentions may be benign. Yet when the anti-terror laws were passed no expected them to be used, as they have been, to remove a heckler from the Labour party conference or to arrest people simply for reading out the names of the war dead at the Cenotaph in Whitehall.

Under this Labour Government we have seen a great expansion of the surveillance society. There is a huge difference between an appropriate roll-out of CCTV cameras in town centres which most people support, and the this type of Orwellian centralisation where people's personal information, and records of their everyday actions, are recorded and stored by the Government, just because the technology exists to do it.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Harrod

Prospective Liberal Democrat MP, Bristol North West