Yakking for Argyll

It’s not the right to detain for 42 days without charge nor the requirement to have an ID card that are the problems. The worry is what the Government would do with these rights once it had them. If they get these powers it’s you and me who’ll be locked up - to shut us up or to save the Government of the day from the unthinkable horrors of an occasional embarrassment.

Don’t ever forget that the raft of ill-written, authoritarian legislation that the two Bs - Blair and Blunkett - rammed through in the wake of the London bombings were never used against terrorist suspects. They were only used against British citizens like you and me who were protesting peacefully about the war in Iraq and the big B’s role in getting us into it. It’s not the lawmakers who enforce the law. It’s the ordinary plod. Armed with Blunkett’s laws, the plods arrested and charged people in Brighton during Blair’s last Labour Conference - for wearing anti-Blair T-shirts. And there was the woman in Westminster arrested and charged simply for reading aloud in public the names of servicemen who had died in Iraq.

Before we comfort ourselves that the authorities act responsibly and only with good reason - is that what the family of Jean Charles de Menezes discovered when their utterly innocent son was shot dead before terrified members of the public in a London tube? Time for a wake up call.