Why David Davis is a hero

Normally, Tory Home Secretaries, even shadow ones, are not known for their defence of civil liberties, nor are they thought to harbour a great love of human rights. As such David Davis, who resigned yesterday in sheer revulsion at Parliament's vote in favour of 42-day detention without charge, is an unlikely hero. But a hero he undoubtedly is. In a passionate and principled speech he outlined the reasons why he was incensed by the "insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms".

Davis was equally angered by the amoral manner in which the government had bought the vote. For him, New Labour's 30 pieces of silver ensured that Parliament betrayed that most fundamental tenet of genuine liberty, freedom from arbitrary power.

It is time Britons realised they have sleep- walked into the most illiberal surveillance

state in the western world. We imprison more people than anyone else in western Europe; we have created the largest DNA database in the world with more than 1m innocent people on it, including 100,000 blameless children.

There is one CCTV camera for every 14 citizens, and New Labour is proposing a widely expensive and invasive identity card scheme for every citizen and purported resident. Nearly 800 government departments and public bodies can intercept our mail, tap our phones and look at our e-mails. And more than 1,000 separate requests are made to do this every day.

And lest we think that such measures are only deployed against terrorists or citizens of Pakistani descent, we need only recall Poole Borough Council using anti-terrorist legislation (the notorious Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act of 2000) to employ private detectives to watch the family of a three-year-old who they (wrongly) suspected of not living in the catchment area for the local infant school.

Under this most 'progressive' of governments, genuine protest has been