You are free, keep repeating 'we are free'

I wrote last week about the Government's proposals to protect 'decent people' from Bad People doing Bad Things. George Monbiot covers the same subject in today's Guardian, with some examples of how previous laws designed to stop Bad People have suffered from just a little bit of creeping from what they were originally promised to do:

When Caroline Flint, the Home Office minister, introduced these proposals to a grateful nation on Friday, she promised that "we are not talking about denying people the right to protest". We have every reason to disbelieve her. The same promise was made with the introduction of the 1986 Public Order Act, the 1992 Trade Union Act and the 1994 Criminal Justice Act, and immediately broken. When the 1997 Protection from Harassment Act was passed, the government swore that it would not be used against demonstrators: it was intended solely to protect people from stalkers. The first three people to be prosecuted under the act were all peaceful protesters. The government also assured us that it would not misuse the antisocial behaviour orders it introduced in 1998 to deal with nuisance neighbours. They, too, were immediately deployed against peaceful demonstrators. It is hard to think of a better tool for state repression: once an order has been served on a protester, he is banned from protesting until it lapses. The police now use it to neutralise the most effective activists. The government liked this new power so much that in 2003 it wrote it into law, with an Anti-Social Behaviour Act designed to restrict peaceful protest.

When some of us complained that the Terrorism Act 2000 was so loosely drafted that it could be deployed against almost anyone seeking political change, the government told us we were being hysterical. Since then, peaceful protesters all over Britain have been arrested as potential terrorists. At the Fairford air base, for example, the police used the act to terrorise the peace campaigners protesting against the Iraq war. The protesters were repeatedly stopped and searched: often one team of police would let someone go after a full body search, and another one would immediately seize her and repeat the whole procedure (this happened to one protester 11 times in one day). On March 22 last year, the police seized three coaches carrying people to a peaceful demonstration at Fairford, held them for two hours, confiscated their possessions, then sealed off the entire motorway network between Gloucestershire and London, and escorted them back to the capital. The police and the home secretary knew full well that these people were not terrorists. They also knew that the law allowed them to be treated as if they were.

It doesn't end here. The civil contingencies bill, which permits the government to suspend parliament and ban all rights to assembly whenever it decides that it is confronting an emergency, passed its second reading in the Lords last month. It could become law later this year.

But then who cares about your vanishing civil liberties when there's yobs, crackheads, junkies, terrorists and all sorts of Bad People who want to do Bad Things to you. Stay in your homes, citizens, remain calm, all is well, the government is your friend and wants to protect you from all those nasty things like thinking from yourself that could cause you to experience momentary confusions like believing our glorious leaders are potentially fallible. Look! Over there! Terrorists!