Liberty in Britain is facing death by a thousand cuts. We can fight back

Timothy Garton Ash wrote the following piece in The Guardian. I believe he is right to highlight the gradual loss of our freedom, not necessarily by big changes but by lots of little ammendments to legislation hidden with other acts such as the information sharing orders hidden with the coroners and justice bill. There is a saying that "If you put a frog in a pot of boiling water it will jump out but if you put it in cold water and gradually turn the heat on it will boil to death", this is what our government is doing to us - they are not marching in with marshall law and concentration camps but slowly, very slowly they are cutting off our ability to protest, cutting off our freedom to choose our own lives, cutting off our ability to remove them from power.

For 30 years I have been travelling to unfree places, from East Germany to Burma, and writing about them in the belief that I was coming from one of the freest countries in the world. I wanted people in those places to enjoy more of what we had. In the last few years, I have woken up - late in the day, but better late than never - to the way in which individual liberty, privacy and human rights have been sliced away in Britain, like salami, under New Labour governments that profess to find in liberty the central theme of British history.

"Oh, these powers will almost never be used," they say every time. "Ordinary people have nothing to fear. It affects just 0.1%." But a hundred times 0.1% is 10%. The East Germans are now more free than we are, at least in terms of law and administrative practice in such areas as surveillance and data collection. Thirty years ago, they had the Stasi. Today, Britain has such broadly drawn and elastic surveillance laws that Poole borough council could exploit them to spend two weeks spying on a family wrongly accused of lying on a school application form. The official spies reportedly made copious notes on the movements of the mother and her three children, whom they referred to as "targets", and watched the family go home at night to establish where they were sleeping. And this is supposed to be modern Britain?

READ MORE at:-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/feb/19/civil-liberties-terrorism