George III Is Spinning In His Grave

NY Times: Tory Campaigns For Office on Liberty Plank

July 12, 2008

Tory Draws Notice and Votes, Warning of Siege on Liberties

By JOHN F. BURNS

WILLERBY, England — Not long ago, Labor critics in the House of Commons had the habit of calling David Davis a “bruiser.” It was a sobriquet he earned as the Conservative Party’s unyielding point man on issues of law and order and as a proponent of bringing back the death penalty last used in Britain more than 40 years ago.

But as he campaigned around the villages and towns of the rolling Yorkshire countryside near here for a by-election he won Friday, Mr. Davis, 59, was embraced by many as an improbable standard-bearer for traditional British liberties.

In a one-issue campaign, he focused on what he called “the steady, insidious and relentless erosion” of individual freedoms by the Labor government. He denounced as especially threatening a six-week detention power the government plans to give the police to help combat the growing terrorist threat it says Britain faces from an underground network of Islamist extremists.

The bill of particulars Mr. Davis cited in his campaign included other measures adopted by the government in recent years to combat a deteriorating law-and-order situation....

Among other issues he cited:

• A national DNA registry kept by the police that included more than two million people, including 100,000 children;
  
• The proliferation of closed-circuit television cameras to an extent that, he said, meant that there was one camera for every 14 citizens in the country
  
• A multibillion-dollar plan for national identity cards packed with personal data.
• New hate laws that he said had stifled legitimate public debate;
  
• The collection of a vast archive of personal data about British citizens on government databases that he described as fundamentally insecure
  
• Powers given to more than 600 public agencies, including municipalities, that he said allowed them to conduct warrantless surveillance of people’s everyday lives, by eavesdropping on phone calls and e-mail traffic and by intercepting mail.

Mr. Davis was previously a member of Tony Blair's, and then Gordon Brown's, cabinets.

Mr. Davis, who spent a year at Harvard in the mid-1980s studying management, has said Britain can learn from the United States. Civil liberties have been protected better there, he said, partly because of the recourse Americans have to provisions in the Constitution.

“I’m with Benjamin Franklin,” he said as he toured polling stations near his Willerby headquarters on Thursday afternoon. “He said those who would trade fundamental liberties for a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security.”

...

The immediate spur to Mr. Davis’s action was a Commons vote to give the police up to six weeks to question terrorist suspects before charging or releasing them, up from the existing four-week limit. He acted less than 12 hours after the Brown government narrowly won approval for the measure.

Mr. Davis said the six-week provision would give the British police “dictatorial” powers available in no other democratic state and far exceeded even the most stringent detention powers adopted in domestic law by other Western countries that have faced a major terrorist threat since the attacks of Sept. 11.

So, the "Conservative" Party is what they now call the Tories. You know, Royalists. As opposed, on this side of "the pond", to Patriots...