The Road to Southend Pier | Ross Clark | Review by The Spectator

It is central to his thesis that these affronts to the British way of life do not even offer us much compensating protection. At the forefront of the war on terror, our airports are wired up with every conceivable means of tracking who and what is moving about within them. Yet in the three months between April and June 2007 alone the six largest European airlines managed to lose 1.12 million passengers’ bags.

Indeed, the more complex the state’s information databases become, the more they are open to statistical misinterpretation. An investigation by the Police National Inspectorate suggested that there were errors in a fifth of records on the Police National Computer. Not all were trivial. In 2,700 cases they involved connecting innocent people to criminal activity. And those are just the cases that were spotted.

Meanwhile, the one group the surveillance society seems restrained from harassing are alleged terrorists. Why, if it is all right to monitor everyone’s comings and goings on security cameras, is it not all right to use wiretap information against identifiable terror suspects in court? Look but do not listen appears to be the adage. While the rest of us can have our fingerprints and DNA put on a database for the most trivial of infringements, the 2005 Prevention of Terrorism Act prohibits this being done to terror suspects with control orders.

Nor should it be imagined a more comprehensive system is the answer. The proposed State ID card will do almost nothing to crack down on benefit fraudsters. After all, they are lying about their circumstances, not their identity. Similarly, it was the intentions rather than the identity of the 7/7 bombers about which the intelligence authorities could not be sure. An iris scan is not a window on the soul.

Meanwhile, the Government remains bewitched by its technological toys. One Labour minister, Malcolm Wicks, has even suggested surgically inserting microchips into the elderly and confused so that satellite tracking devices can pinpoint their movements if they stray too far from their allotted rest home. Frankly, there comes a time when we should all cry out, ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’