IF YOU'VE GOT NOTHING TO HIDE DON'T READ THIS

There is a silly argument always used when seeking to attack privacy as part of the current culture of surveillance and the steady and unrelenting attack on our civil liberties, it goes along the lines of ‘if you've got nothing to hide what are you afraid of?’ My response to this is that if you have got nothing to hide, nothing you would prefer to keep private, you have led a shallow and wholly insubstantial life. P G Wodehouse once reflected if you sent the following telegram to a random group of individuals: - ‘All is discovered. Flee,’ nine out of ten would pack up and leave the country.

It is the stuff of life, it is what we do, it comes in a package marked ‘the human condition,’ we make mistakes, do things we are ashamed off, hold discreditable thoughts; we lust, we envy and stoop to low cunning. When Jesus said “Let him without sin cast the first stone,” for once, at least, he knew what he was talking about.

And still the assault on civil liberties goes on, this time undertaken by those who only a few years ago were presenting themselves as the protectors of ancient British liberties.

However do not expect a robust defence of liberty from the left, the dismal record of the Labour party respecting civil liberties represents a truly appalling indictment. The best defence of civil liberties has been left to David Davis the backbench Tory MP, a man whose views on many other things I would strongly disagree, he is however that rare breed, a truly principled politician.

Someone called Professor Anthony Glees has been doing the rounds of the television and radio studios seeking to promote the case for making further encroachments on our liberties by scaremongering about the Jubilee and Olympics. What he fails to inform you is that no legislation could possibly make its way onto the statute book before either of these events.

A couple of weeks back a young man was sent to prison for some moronic remarks he made on Facebook about the footballer Patrice Muamba, remarks that were greeted with dismay and rejected even by his own followers, no one was injured, threatened or intimidated, still he got time. The silence of those on the left faced by this grotesque assault on basic liberties was deafening. To find a defence of such liberties one needs to go to the pages of The Spectator not The New Statesman.

I have vivid memories of the 1970’s and well remember the trials of members of the IRA, ETA, of the Red Army Faction and the Red Brigades. All such ‘left’ and nationalist groups contained more than their fair share of psychopaths and general all round fruitcakes, still what I do remember is their contempt for the system that brought them to justice, their refusal to recognise the courts or make appeals to the legal niceties of bourgeois society. How this contrasts with the pathetic whinging of the likes of Abu Hamsa desperately clutching at any straw provided by the Kaffir justice he so openly affects to despise.

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