Paranoid, suspicion, obsessive surveillance – and a land of liberty destroyed by stealth

Returning to Britain from a summer holiday abroad, you begin to notice things that perhaps escaped your attention before – the huge number of CCTV cameras that infest our public spaces and, much less obviously, the atmosphere of watchfulness and control that has now become a way of life.

This is the regime that 12 years of New Labour have imposed on Britain, a place of unwavering suspicion, paranoia – and obsessive surveillance.

We have become the sort of society that we would unhesitatingly have railed against a few years ago. But, because the change has been brought about with such stealth, we are the very last to see it.

The latest figures, in a report by the Interception of Communications Commissioner, Sir Paul Kennedy, are truly terrifying. They reveal that a request is made every minute to snoop on someone’s phone records or email accounts.

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