clipped from: www.dailymail.co.uk Today, in Tony Blair's Britain - which I naively voted into power ten years ago - we have witnessed a breath-taking erosion of civil liberties.
Between May 1997 and August 2006, New Labour created 3,023 new criminal offences - taking in everything from a law against Polish potatoes (the Polish Potatoes Order 2004) to one which made the creation of a nuclear explosion in Britain officially illegal.
First there was the Act which banned the age- old right of protest within half-a-mile of Parliament without special police authorisation.
Totalitarian regimes have, after all, always collected information on their citizens. Hitler pioneered the use of ID cards as a means of repression. The Belgians left Rwanda with a bloody legacy by implementing an ID card system which divided the population into Hutu and Tutsi.