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 attacked media exaggeration, and the then Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, 
 weighed in with a speech at the London School of Economics naming me and two 
 other journalists and complaining about "the pernicious and even dangerous 
 poison" in the media. 
  
 So, I guess this column comes with a health warning from the British 
 Government, but please don't pay it any mind. When governments attack the 
 media, it is often a sign that the media have for once gotten something 
 right. I might add that this column also comes with the more serious warning 
 that, if rights have been eroded in the land once called "the Mother of 
 Parliaments", it can happen in any country where a government actively 
 promotes the fear of terrorism and crime and uses it to persuade people that 
 they must exchange their freedom for security. 
  
 Blair's campaign against rights contained in the Rule of Law - that is, that 
 ancient amalgam of common law, convention, and the opinion of experts, which 
 makes up one half of the British constitution - is often well concealed. 
 Many of the measures have been slipped through under legislation that 
 appears to address problems the public is concerned about. For instance, the 
 law banning people from demonstrating within one kilometre of Parliament is 
 contained in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act of 2005. The right 
 to protest freely has been affected by the Terrorism Act of 2000, which 
 allows police to stop and search people in a designated area - which can be 
 anywhere - and by antisocial behaviour laws, which allow police to issue an 
 order banning someone from a particular activity, waving a banner, for 
 instance. If a person breaks that order, he or she risks a prison sentence 
 of up to five years. Likewise, the Protection from Harassment Act of 1997 - 
 designed to combat stalkers and campaigns of intimidation - is being used to 
 control protest. A woman who sent two e-mails to a pharmaceutical company 
 politely asking a member of the staff not to work with a company that did 
 testing on animals was prosecuted for "repeated conduct" in sending an 
 e-mail twice, which the Act defines as harassment. 
  
 There is a demonic versatility to Blair's laws. Kenneth Clarke, a former 
 Conservative chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary, despairs at the 
 way they are being used. "What is assured as being harmless when it is 
 introduced gets used more and more in a way which is sometimes alarming," he 
 says. His colleague David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, is astonished by 
 Blair's Labour Party: "If I had gone on the radio 15 years ago and said that 
 a Labour government would limit your right to trial by jury, would limit - 
 in some cases eradicate - habeas corpus, constrain your right of freedom of 
 speech, they would have locked me up." 
  
 Indeed they would. But there's more, so much in fact that it is difficult to 
 grasp the scope of the campaign against British freedoms. But here goes. The 
 right to a jury trial is removed in complicated fraud cases and where there 
 is a fear of jury tampering. The right not to be tried twice for the same 
 offence - the law of double jeopardy - no longer exists. The presumption of 
 innocence is compromised, especially in antisocial behaviour legislation, 
 which also makes hearsay admissible as evidence. The right not to be 
 punished unless a court decides that the law has been broken is removed in 
 the system of control orders by which a terrorist suspect is prevented from 
 moving about freely and using the phone and internet, without at any stage 
 being allowed to hear the evidence against him - house arrest in all but 
 name. 
  
 Freedom of speech is attacked by Section Five of the Criminal Justice and 
 Public Order Act, which preceded Blair's Government, but which is now being 
 used to patrol opinion. In Oxford last year a 21-year-old graduate of 
 Balliol College named Sam Brown drunkenly shouted in the direction of two 
 mounted police officers, "Mate, you know your horse is gay. I hope you don't 
 have a problem with that." He was given one of the new, on-the-spot fines - 
 B#80 - which he refused to pay, with the result that he was taken to court. 
 Some 10 months later the Crown Prosecution Service dropped its case that he 
 had made homophobic remarks likely to cause disorder. 
  
 There are other people the police have investigated but failed to prosecute: 
 the columnist Cristina Odone, who made a barely disparaging aside about 
 Welsh people on TV (she referred to them as "little Welshies"); and the head 
 of the Muslim Council of Great Britain, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who said that 
 homosexual practices were "not acceptable" and civil partnerships between 
 gays were "harmful". 
  
 The remarks may be a little inappropriate, but I find myself regretting that 
 my countrymen's opinions - their bloody-mindedness, their truculence in the 
 face of authority, their love of insult and robust debate - are being edged 
 out by this fussy, hairsplitting, second-guessing, politically correct state 
 that Blair is trying to build with what he calls his "respect agenda". 
  
 Do these tiny cuts to British freedom amount to much more than a few people 
 being told to be more considerate? Shami Chakrabarti, the petite whirlwind 
 who runs Liberty believes that "the small measures of increasing ferocity 
 add up over time to a society of a completely different flavour". That is 
 exactly the phrase I was looking for. Britain is not a police state - the 
 fact that Tony Blair felt it necessary to answer me by e-mail proves that - 
 but it is becoming a very different place under his rule, and all sides of 
 the House of Commons agree. The Liberal Democrats' spokesman on human rights 
 and civil liberties, David Heath, is sceptical about Blair's use of the 
 terrorist threat. "The age-old technique of any authoritarian or repressive 
 government has always been to exaggerate the terrorist threat to justify 
 their actions," he says. "I am not one to underestimate the threat of 
 terrorism, but I think it has been used to justify measures which have no 
 relevance to attacking terrorism effectively." And Bob Marshall-Andrews - a 
 Labour MP who, like quite a number of others on Blair's side of the House of 
 Commons, is deeply worried about the tone of government - says of his boss, 
 "Underneath, there is an unstable authoritarianism which has seeped into the 
 [Labour] Party." 
  
 Chakrabarti, who once worked as a lawyer in the Home Office, explains: "If 
 you throw live frogs into a pan of boiling water, they will sensibly jump 
 out and save themselves. If you put them in a pan of cold water and gently 
 apply heat until the water boils they will lie in the pan and boil to death. 
 It's like that." In Blair you see the champion frog boiler of modern times. 
 He is also a lawyer who suffers acute impatience with the processes of the 
 law. In one of his e-mails to me he painted a lurid - and often true - 
 picture of the delinquency in some of Britain's poorer areas, as well as the 
 helplessness of the victims. His response to the problem of societal 
 breakdown was to invent a new category of restraint called the antisocial 
 behaviour order, or Asbo. 
  
 "Please speak to the victims of this menace," he wrote. "They are people 
 whose lives have been turned into a daily hell. Suppose they live next door 
 to someone whose kids are out of control: who play their music loud until 2 
 am; who vilify anyone who asks them to stop; who are often into drugs or 
  
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 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)