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Full marks to the students who complained to their headteacher about the intrusive taking of fingerprints in their school

The brilliant new documentary about privacy by David Bond, Erasing David, has a telling scene in Chipping Campden School, Gloucestershire, where the headteacher shows off a new fingerprinting system that allows pupils to register and take their meals by pressing a pad.

The headteacher, Annette France, demonstrates the £25,000 system in front of a classroom of kids, most of whom look pretty underwhelmed. Possibly France was put off by the camera and the kids smirking behind her back but I sensed a shiftiness in her attitude, as though she was beginning to realise that collecting biometrics from children and dismissing parents' concerns was actually rather weird behaviour.

In south Devon, the kids and parents are made from sterner stuff. Students at Kingsbridge community college have rebelled against this pernicious practice of taking fingerprints and have won the support of the Totnes MP Anthony Steen, who has written to schools secretary Ed Balls. At St King Edward Vl community college, also in Devon, parents have protested about a similar system.

A delegation of four students at Kingsbridge school met the headteacher, Roger Pope, last week and sent a letter to Steen which said:

Roger Pope is going to discuss our objections with the governors, but in the meantime we are trying to gather more evidence and support for our cause. We would be interested to know where you stand on this matter and would welcome your support if possible.

Steen took up the case:

I have considerable sympathy for students at the college who do not want to be fingerprinted.

Although I welcome the idea of a cashless society, I personally would not wish to have the contours of my fingerprints kept solely to enable me to buy food at school.

What's wrong with a plastic card to swipe? Or what about cash for counters?

The answer is that schools like Kingsbridge community college and Chipping Campden School have become obsessed with these expensive monitoring systems without really thinking of the rights of children and parents. The thrilling sense of control they give school authorities trumps the express wishes of parents who are worried about privacy and the eventual use of the biometric data. The same objections, by the way, have been voiced at the disgraceful practice of putting CCTV in classrooms.

With the daily reports of data loss and security breaches (the latest concerns the T-Mobile phone company) the case against the needless accumulation of personal data has been made so convincingly that it is surprising that these schools are still spending public money on systems, which they cannot guarantee are secure.

Roger Pope insists that the fingerprint cannot be recreated from any loss of data but how many times have we been told to entrust our personal information to authorities and businesses only to find it has been released in the great haemorrhage of data from public and private bodies? How can he be sure that a new technique will not be invented to breach his students privacy and recreate the fingerprint?

Steen said:

I am in touch with the secretary of state for children, schools and families, Ed Balls MP, asking what the government's view is. I hope he doesn't tell me the state knows best and individuals are merely cogs in the glorious system.

Good to hear a Conservative saying such things. Let's hope the party continues to do so if it wins the next election.

Let's be clear about these systems – they are an intrusive waste of money. The four students who have challenged Pope should be awarded a special prize for showing more initiative and common sense than their headmaster.

They have my support.

• Schools
• Surveillance
• Children
• Human rights
• School meals
• Education policy

Student activism has often fired resistance to repression – and it must urgently do so now

Twenty years ago, the Velvet Revolution got under way in Czechoslovakia with a student march that was brutally suppressed by the communist regime, with hundreds of young people clubbed to the ground by police. It's a pattern we have got used to seeing, and when the former president Vaclav Havel sets off along the route of the November 17 March it's worth remembering the Iranian students who are suffering now for the same cause.

The Czech revolution was celebrated this weekend in a number of events in Prague, which I attended with a couple of English friends, Nick Fraser of the BBC and Everyman publisher David Campbell, who as students watched the Soviet clampdown in 1968. Campbell was there for the invasion and was dragged from the path of a Soviet tank by a young man named Oldřich Černý, who later became a noted dissident, a colleague of Havel's and head of the Czech Foreign Intelligence Service. Campbell, Fraser and Černý have been friends since '68.

Forty-one years later, Černý was our host as we sat in an audience of students at the Arts Faculty of Charles University listening to a debate, Freedom and Its Adversaries. When we entered, I noticed the memorial on the wall of the building to the student Jan Palach, who set fire to himself on January 16, 1969, not in direct protest to the Soviet invasion, as is often thought, but to stir his compatriots into action. Almost his last words as he lay dying from 85% burns were: "I wanted to express my disagreement with what is going on here and to make people wake up."

Looking round at the earnest faces of the new generation of Czech students, it stuck me that liberty will always owe youth — if I were to identify one of the real adversaries of freedom it would certainly be student indifference.

I was not in Prague to watch the student march 20 years ago, but in Berlin I watched students climb the wall and right from the start, the marches in Leipzig were fired by student activism.

The debate was fascinating, firstly because none of the participants – the dramatist Tom Stoppard, Adam Michnik, one of the heroes of the Polish democratic movement, Jacques Rupnik, a political scientist , Martin Bútora, a Slovak dissident and diplomat, Timothy Garton Ash, the academic and Guardian columnist, and Andrei Piontkovsky, the Russian scientist and political writer – is frightened to talk about ideas, which is quite a relief when you come from the literal, head-banging political culture of Question Time. Rupnik and Bútora were strikingly good. Both spoke of the political disengagement that followed the revolutions in the east and which is so evident in our own society. Rupnik said:

We opted for the quickest form of a free society after '89 and that was imitation. There was no experiment. We just imitated the functioning market economy. The result is that today we have exhausted that cycle. Our political elites are exhausted.
Not a single new idea. No new people. We are burnt out. We have the institutional shell, but it is hollow.

How familiar that last part seems as we stagger towards a general election in Britain.

Bútora talked about the combination of civic indifference and civic helplessness that has paralysed politics in the new democracies, again something that we know about. There were two specific problems in this "hollowed out politics". First was the failure of imagination that says human beings have certain qualities and one of these is the belief that things can be improved. The second is the failure to join and to become active: "We need islands of positive deviance where we say, 'Please come! Please join!' Together we can achieve much." At this Havel, sitting with Madeleine Albright, clapped enthusiastically. The phrase "islands of positive deviance" sounds like a bit of managerial bullshit but Bútora makes a good point. The revolutions in eastern Europe started with small groups of people who achieved critical mass from very unpromising beginnings.

My one criticism of the session is that no one on the panel spoke about the threat to freedom posed by the deep erosions of personal privacy that are being pioneered by the British government and may come to impact all free societies. Most Europeans have no idea about the advances of the surveillance state here: about such things as a DNA database containing the profiles of a million innocent – often black – people, the number recognition cameras that track our journeys, the 4.5m CCTV cameras on our streets, the CRB checks of 11 million people, the proposals to access data from all our communications and internet usage, the sinister children's databases, the 500,000 people who fell under some kind of official surveillance last year in the United Kingdom.

It's almost too embarrassing to talk about these dirty British secrets in the company of man like Michnik, who spent a total of six years in Polish jails because of his beliefs in liberty and democracy. How could we be so cavalier with our birthright when people like him made so many sacrifices? But at least the chair, Garton Ash, said this: "What is happening in my country, the oldest free country in the world, is that our civil liberties are being eroded in an extraordinary way, like the famous salami – cut for cut. And nobody is really standing up."

Time to wake up. Time for students in Britain to grasp what is happening.

• Czech Republic
• Student politics
• Civil liberties

It is difficult not to agree with the Liberal Democrats when they accuse the Conservatives of double standards on state powers

It is difficult not to agree with the Liberal Democrats when they accuse the Conservatives of double standards on state powers. Tory peers this week abstained on proposals to throw out Jack Straw's measure to replace inquests with secret inquiries. This new law will substantially reduce accountability when it comes to inquests that threaten to expose government or official incompetence.

Baroness Miller said:

Who can tell what the Tories' principles really are? On Monday in the Commons, they voted with the Liberal Democrats and 31 Labour rebels against secret inquiries. The government forced the proposals through with a majority of eight. Yesterday the Conservatives sat on their hands, allowing these oppressive proposals for secret inquiries to get through. David Cameron claims the Tories are against an over-bearing state, but their abstention on this vote shows that they still think they can get away with saying one thing and doing another.

This little noticed vote may be key to the actual nature of the Tories who, with the appalling Murdoch family behind them, now sense power and are beginning to think not as the opposition but as a government in waiting.

Ken Clarke says a hung parliament would be a disaster. I don't agree. With the Conservatives showing such contempt for accountability, a hung parliament may be the only hope for a free society in Britain. Labour is obviously beyond reform, but the Tories need to be made to feel that they have to work for their votes by signing up to a properly accountable and open government with more than just soundbites.

• Jack Straw
• Civil liberties
• Law

Last night the inventor of DNA profiling, Sir Alec Jeffreys, condemned the government's plans, announced yesterday, to keep the DNA of innocent people on the national DNA database for six years in defiance of a ruling by the European court of human rights.

Jeffreys was taking part in a panel discussion to celebrate Hammersmith and Fulham law centre's 30th annual general meeting in London with Gavin Phillipson, professor of law at Durham, and me. While we debated the merits of a universal national DNA database, he agreed with the professor's view that the Home Office's reaction was illegal. He also attacked the Home Office's use of genetic science and isotope testing in the controversial Human Provenance Project, which is designed to establish the race and origin of asylum seekers.

He said that there were no known scientists involved in the project and that it was wrong to try to establish a person's race and recent history by these means. He said that DNA travelled across borders and that the idea that race could be defined in this way was misguided and almost certainly morally flawed.

Jeffreys agreed to take part in the debate because 24 years previously he had been contacted by the law centre in the case of a Ghanaian woman, Christiana Sarbah, and her son, Andrew, who were struggling to prove to the Home Office that they were mother and son. DNA fingerprinting technology had only recently been developed and had never been used in court or any other form of appeal. His involvement meant that Christiana Sarbah established that Andrew was her son, not her nephew.

During a lecture before the debate last night, he said that the whole history of DNA fingerprinting and crime scene investigation had been influenced by the law centre's decision to contact him in the Sarbah case: the publicity put the technology on the map and showed its enormous potential, which was later fully realised when the Nobel prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis invented Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), a means of amplifying tiny quantities of DNA.

I don't think I am being biased when I say that the audience – which included many lawyers – was not particularly sympathetic in the debate to Prof Phillipson's case for a universal DNA database, in which everyone in the United Kingdom would be compelled to give their DNA to the state. In an answer to one woman, who said she would rather go to prison than give up her DNA, he said that people who objected to the idea were being "individualistic" by putting concerns for their own civil liberties above the good of society.

That is the classic New Labour position but I was surprised to hear it so clearly articulated by a human rights lawyer, who I imagined might be concerned to support the needs and liberty of the individual against the ever-increasing demands of a state claiming to be acting in the interest of society. This rather arrogant belief allows the government to boast without pause about the introduction of the Human Rights Act and yet at the same time ignore the clear and unanimous ruling by the European court of human rights.

The position is not just hypocritical but seemingly utterly illegal. Nothing could be clearer: the Home Office does not believe in the rule of law, and it was good and fitting that, while celebrating the excellent work done by the Hammersmith and Fulham law centre and Christiana Sarbah's victory against the Home Office, we could at least agree on that.

• DNA database
• Civil liberties

The government has delayed legislation that would allow it to track our phone and internet use – but that won't be the end of it

Legislation for the "interception modernisation programme" will not be included in the Queen's speech next week. But do not relax: the Home Office has an unyielding ambition to grant itself and 653 authorities access to the data from every email, phone call, text message and internet connectionThis apparent withdrawal is in fact a long-range strategy that seeks to defuse the issue before the general election, at a time when there is increasing fear about Britain's surveillance state. How wise would it have been to make the Queen rehearse these dreadful measures in her speech, just a week after celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Stasi? The Home Office and Alan Johnson know better than to make a gift like this to those who question not just this government's motives but the relentlessly authoritarian agenda in the Home Office.

There are other good reasons for the delay, now that the idea of an expensive single database has been abandoned. The companies who will be charged with gathering and retaining information on their customers have raised doubts about feasibility, as well as privacy and cost. The Home Office must gain their compliance. So they have taken the heat out of the issue and are biding their time until a future Conservative government has been groomed by officials to see the overwhelming need for this massive spy system.

Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, quoted in the Daily Telegraph, certainly does not give much confidence that he will resist such demands. He said: "The big danger in all this is 'mission creep'."

He means to say "function creep", but naturally once the system is set up there will be no need for creep of any kind because its sole purpose is to spy on anyone the government or local authorities chose. All it needs is a senior police officer to give the go-ahead, and at that point, when even the fire service will be able to access the data from a person's communications, we will be able to declare without doubt the death of Britain's free society.

Judging by Grayling's limp reaction to the story, I don't believe the Conservatives can yet be trusted. In all these areas, they hedge their bets, trim their language and finesse their stance. Until they start reacting like David Davis, who instinctively understands the threat posed by the Home Office and generally by surveillance systems, they are not worth voting for.

Like those people who made the fall of the wall happen, at some stage the British will have to fight for their freedom. Let's not leave it until it's too late.

• Data protection
• Data and computer security
• Internet
• Politics and technology
• Labour
• Mobile phones

Government attempts to override a free speech clause in a homophobic hatred bill illustrate its determination to attack rights

"The politically motivated trampling of free speech is something that should concern us all," says a letter in the Times from the Conservative peer Lord Waddington and the Labour MP and former backbencher of the year David Taylor.

After a free speech clause was inserted into a new offence of homophobic hatred in May 2008 and the bill was enacted, the government has returned to try to get its way by introducing a clause in another bill that repeals the earlier guarantee. You can't have a better example of the remorseless energy that attacks rights. It will surprise few to learn that the new clause appears in the coroners and justice bill which has been drafted by Jack Straw's Justice Department. The letter says:

The free speech clause is supported across the political spectrum. Liberty, the Church of England, Matthew Parris and Rowan Atkinson have also joined the ranks who back it.

The old clause says:

For the avoidance of doubt, the discussion or criticism of sexual conduct or practices or the urging of persons to refrain from or modify such conduct or practices shall not be taken of itself to be threatening or intended to stir up hatred.

In March this year this was deleted but the Lords reversed the decision of the Commons in a move that clearly acknowledges the wide support for the protection of free speech and the undesirability of the police monitoring people's speech and writings for signs of illegality.

Lord Waddington, a former home secretary, who I would suggest has a keener idea of rights and liberty than any of his Labour successors, wrote on this site:

Not so long ago five officers approached a church worker as he handed out invitations to an Easter service and seized them for examination, citing allegations of homophobia.
Not surprisingly they contained no reference to sexuality and the police dropped the matter. But this case should set alarm bells ringing in the ears of all who care about free speech.

In their letter today, the two parliamentarians say: "It is the duty of parliament to try to prevent this from continuing to happen."

Spot on. It will be interesting to see who votes against free speech.

• Freedom of Speech
• Gay rights
• House of Commons
• House of Lords

It is difficult to think of two more sinister New Labour figures than Phil Woolas, minister for immigration, and Lady Delyth Morgan, parliamentary under-secretary for children. They are joined in unholy alliance in the foreword to the new government guidelines on safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children under section 55 of the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009.

This baleful document is not of course about safeguarding children at all – it's about handling innocent kids over long periods of detention, which often exceed the 28-day maximum period a terror suspect can be held without charge.

Dripping with hypocrisy, the ministers' opener makes no mention of this. It's all about benevolence and care and agencies working together for the best outcomes. Armando Iannucci might have written it. "The UK Border Agency undertakes difficult and sensitive work on behalf of a society as a whole. Working with children presents particular challenges. To meet these challenges effectively the UK Border Agency needs the support of all those with an interest in children."

Nowhere does the word detention appear. Nowhere do they concede that children are being taken from their beds by uniformed guards and brought into the strange and frightening circumstances of the three detention centres in Britain.

The guidelines are mostly an exercise in empty declaration. Under the section entitled "Understanding the duty to make arrangements to safeguard and promote the welfare of children" this rather Orwellian document asserts: "The duty does not give the UK Border Agency any new functions, nor does it override its existing functions. It does require the agency to carry out its existing functions in a way that takes into account the need to safeguard and promote the welfare of children."

The primary obligation is to prevent "the impairment of children's health or development", almost impossible in weeks of tedious confinement, fear and stress, which so many other countries avoid by using houses where people seeking asylum may stay. But not in New Labour's Britain, where we have an unelected children's minister such as the baroness who is prepared to preside over this appalling injustice without the slightest prick to her conscience.

The detention of the children of asylum seekers is surrounded by secrecy, which is why the Home Office does its best not to answer a straight question such as how many children are being detained every year by the UK Border Agency and for what length of time? These figures are surely a matter of public interest and should be released without fuss each year.

When I last commented on this issue, the Observer received a belligerent letter from David Wood, strategic director of the criminality and detention group at the UK Border Agency, which suggested that my piece was inflammatory and contained statements that "held little basis in fact". The full letter – which was edited for length before publication – said that the average detention period for a child of an asylum seeker was about two weeks.

This average may be true but it does not tell the whole story by any means. I wrote back to say that it was misleading because it did not represent the long periods of detention experienced by many children. Home Office figures released in August 2009 (a snapshot taken in late June) suggested that more than one third of children were detained for more than one month.

I quoted Her Majesty's chief inspector of prisons, Dame Anne Owers, who after a visit to the Yarl's Wood detention centre, wrote: "The monitoring figures that were provided to the team to show length of cumulative detention were found to be wholly inaccurate. For example, children who we were confidentially told had been in detention for 275 days were later said to have been in detention for 14 and 17 days."

The Home Office replied to me by ignoring these points, repeating the average figure of two weeks then adding the usual bromides. "We detain children with their families," wrote the spokesman, "because we believe it is right for them to be together." A weird reason when you think that so many countries have found ways of keeping families together without detention. I wonder if these civil servants have any idea how creepy they sound.

Where I have failed to get the figures, parliamentarians are having more success. Next week, Lord Dubs, a former Labour MP and himself once a refugee, plans to ask the government how many children and young people are currently detained under immigration powers at Yarl's Wood. And in Scotland, Peter Wishart MP of the SNP has attacked the practice of children's imprisonment on moral grounds. "The UK is detaining the equivalent of a high school every year across the UK," he said having been given the figure of more than 1,300 children in detention last year.

"Regardless of what provision is made for children in these centres, that they are being held behind bars is unacceptable" he said. "Children's welfare is not well served by the UK's actions and regardless of their parents' immigration status children should not have to pay this price."

Nothing more needs to be said.

• Children
• Refugees
• Immigration and asylum

Let's see if we can tease out the logic of the latest New Labour backflip.

The former foreign office minister Kim Howells suggests that the policy in Afghanistan is not working and it is time to consider withdrawing troops and putting the money saved as result into the UK Border Agency and greater surveillance and monitoring in Britain.

Like so many in the Labour party, Howells's only response to the failure of a government policy is to propose a general attack on freedom and privacy, placing the nation which is already regarded as the most closely monitored after China and North Korea under even greater surveillance.

Howells was an ardent supporter of both the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war, which is important because it's now accepted that Britain's participation in the Iraq invasion and the long engagement in Basra has a direct bearing on the position that we now find ourselves in Afghanistan. If British and American efforts had been concentrated in Afghanistan after 2001, and had not been thrown at Iraq, where there was no al-Qaida presence, we wouldn't now face such a well-organised threat in Helmand province.

This was pointed out by many critics during the evolution of the disastrous Iraq policy but in this article Howells, once a prominent anti-war campaigner during Vietnam, does not take responsibility himself or for his government. "Like many observers of this eight-year conflict," he says, as though he has been standing on the sidelines for this entire period, "I had hoped that by now a degree of stability might have returned to Afghanistan."

Howells may only be a footnote in the development of government policy but let's be clear that he is inextricably part of the age of stupidity and arrogance inaugurated by Tony Blair. It is simply embarrassing to read his posturing as someone who has come to conversion for humane and practical reasons. The lack of critical introspection, of analysis and honesty, seems to indicate an interior life that is no more sophisticated than a five-year-old's.

His deduction that Britain must retreat and retrench, ignoring all obligations to Nato and the international treaties we have signed, is characteristic of someone who veered from outright communism to a point in the 90s where he could say that the word "socialism" could be "humanely phased out". He has the classic New Labour profile and like fellow migrants from the far left – Straw, Reid, Blunkett and Clarke – he has retained a love of state intrusion and is, as they all are, an enthusiast for ID cards. There is a part of Howells that remains firmly rooted in the beliefs that ruled east Germany until 20 years ago. Actually, what he advocates in this proposed withdrawal from the world is more akin to a British version of Albania, a locked-down police state with stringent border controls and unwavering state control.

It seems extraordinary that this plainly erratic but indifferent performer has recently been made a member of the privy council and is regarded as suitable material to take over as chair of the secretive intelligence and security committee which is meant to oversee and scrutinise the work of the intelligence services.

A former communist running the intelligence oversight committee and now advocating authoritarian policies that attack the very essence of our free society – I would not have dared to put this character in a novel. But there he is, large as life, blathering with the self-importance of one who has seen the light and must save us all.

He concludes his piece with a vision of eternal vigilance, a mini Enver Hoxha alerting his people to ever greater threats from within.

Our police forces, intelligence and border agencies have mammoth tasks. Their budgets already are much larger than they were in the years prior to the attacks on New York and London in 2001 and 2005, but they will have to grow larger still if they are to prevent further atrocities, not least when the eyes of the world will be on London during the 2012 Olympics.

It's been clear for some time that Britain's Olympics will be used to introduce irreversible changes to our country and place it in a new category of society, which through fear and inattention has slipped from freedom into a new form of police state. That is where we will end if people such as Howells are not called on their errors of judgment, their bogus humanity, their refusal to admit responsibility and their barely hidden contempt for liberty.

Yet his article achieves something really rather remarkable. In the unconscious fluency of the idiot savant, Howells has unified New Labour's failure at war and its attack on freedom and laid it out for all of us to see, and for that we should be grateful.

• Afghanistan
• Surveillance
• Civil liberties
• UK security and terrorism
• Terrorism policy

"In the areas of security and liberty many would argue (and I agree) that there has been too much legislation," wrote Charles Clarke last week.

Some may experience a sense of vindication reading this but I believe the proper reaction is nearer scorn, for the article contains neither concession nor apology, but is merely an attempt to reposition Labour before the next election. That is clearly a waste of time, and what we should be doing instead of sifting the ashes of New Labour is concentrating on Conservative plans for this country, which at the moment lack definition and clear expressions of principle. Still, Clarke is a thoughtful, politically energetic man, and what he is saying in this twilight moment is still of interest, even though it is enough to bring you out in hives.

He argues that Labour has essentially got things right, but that the attack on liberty, which he concedes by implication has taken place, was the result of excessive zeal. Retrenchment and simplification – a touch on the tiller – are all that is needed. He seems to acknowledge the hostility to Labour's record and the reasons for it but only suggests rationalisation in response.

Clarke believes in the theory of experimental legislation, whereby a law is made and later adapted if it is found to be operating poorly or is being abused. The imperfections of this approach are plain to see – it takes a long time to persuade government to revise laws. Almost all the function creep that we have seen over the last few years – for instance the use of the Protection from Harassment Act to control legitimate protest, the use of terrorism laws to prevent photography – is the result of poorly drafted law that has no more purpose than declaring the government's intentions or desires on a particular issue. Bad writing and sloppy thinking are at the heart of the attack in liberty.

Like Blunkett, Straw and Reid, Charles Clarke is an incorrigible statist with a background in far-left politics. He has never grasped the truth that good government can only exist where there is a balance between government power and individual freedom. For people like him the wisdom of the state is unquestionable: anyone who points to government inefficiencies or doubts the merit of its decisions becomes an enemy, not of the government, but of the state. It is an arrogance that has grown to a point where Labour politicians simply cannot distinguish between their own interests and the needs of the state. And yet Clarke argues that the effect of Labour legislation has been to reduce the power of the executive and diminish parliament.

This is not a joke. After listing the investment in CCTV and the DNA database, the Human Rights Act, the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (Ripa), the Freedom of Information Act and the Data Protection Act, he says this: Most of this legislation was opposed by the Conservatives and supported by the Liberal Democrats. Its overall effect has been to strengthen the judiciary at the expense of the legislature, to weaken the executive, to empower the media and to discredit the political process. Despite these unwelcome consequences, I continue to believe that the changes were right in principle and should not be reversed.

No one can doubt the deep effects of Labour's "reforms" but to maintain that the executive has suffered in the last 12 years is absurd. And of course parliament was written out of the picture by a dictatorial prime minister and by a government that relied on patronage, thuggish whipping, the unprecedented use of the guillotine to cut short debate, a reduced parliamentary timetable and a big increase in un-debated secondary legislation. This didn't just happen: it was part of a calculated policy to deny debate and scrutiny, which was enforced throughout the long Labour years. To suggest that this was unintended consequence of the laws he cited is pathetic.

When at the Home Office, Clarke could never really understand that the judiciary was not taking part in the execution of government policies. He was constantly arguing that he should be able to negotiate with the judges and find some way of working with them, which he is still harping on about in this article.

The implications of the new supreme court and the way in which the Human Rights Act has worked in practice require an open discussion between the judiciary and the legislature, particularly to clarify where responsibilities for security lie.

The rebuke that Lord Steyn, the former law lord, gave him in 2005, still stands. "Judges are not the servants of the government," Lord Steyn said.

We swear an oath to the Queen as head of state, our duty lies to the public, not the government. I think in all these complaints about how the judges are not being helpful enough they must remember we are emphatically not on the same side.

Clarke never understood this, just as he and Jack Straw, to name another of the chief villains in the attack on liberty, do not really get the difference between state and government and do not comprehend the importance of individual freedom.

But maybe I am being unfair. Perhaps Clarke has an inkling of the destruction that has taken place: in the concluding paragraphs of this piece he returns to muse about the ID cards scheme and databases.

Labour should reject proposals for further radical change in the areas of security and liberty. Our priorities should be to put the constitutional judicial system on a sound footing; to consolidate and revise existing counter-terrorism legislation; to continue reducing crime through more modern policing (including a more rational structure of police forces and more consistent partnership working); and to revise our identity and data protection legislation to put the rights of the individual at the centre.

There is nothing radical in this, because he is only suggesting that people are given access to their data. He does not question whether the state should collect or use it. He does not challenge all the rubbish talked about "identity management" because he cannot get his head round the idea that the state does not have entitlement to our information.

When I read this piece I wondered how the author squares his account of the past 12 years with what is happening in the news.

In recent weeks we have learned about the spying on innocent members of the Asian community that is conducted under the Prevent programme; the secret database of innocent demonstrators maintained by police; the DNA and isotope testing of asylum seekers to establish race and origin; the vast expansion of Criminal Records Bureau checks, which we are told this week is likely to spread to all large firms; the shocking mistreatment of artists, writers, musicians and academics at our borders because of new visa laws; the imprisonment of innocent children whose parents are seeking asylum, the seizing of assets from elderly and mentally impaired by the little-known court of protection; the huge increase in prosecutions of ordinary law-abiding people caught by the thousands of new criminal offences created by Labour; and the continuing expansion of databases, the latest of which will demand 53 pieces of information before a British citizen is allowed to travel abroad.

I could go on. Every month there are literally hundreds of stories that tell of the damage that Labour has wrought on the delicate structures and traditions that used to be called Britain's free society. Clarke and his friends are responsible for this degradation and so, yes, he is right when he says that there has been too much legislation in the areas of liberty and security. But it is also the understatement of the decade.

• Civil liberties
• Labour

Listen to mayor Dorothy Thornhill. Her council has just banned parents from watching their own children at two council play areas in Watford. Quoted in the Watford Observer this evidently simple-minded woman says, "Sadly, in today's climate, you can't have adults walking around unchecked in a children's playground."

Instead of parents being able to watch and play with their own and other people's children at the Harwoods and Harebreaks recreation grounds, vetted council staff known as "play rangers" will be in charge. The mayor says that this enforces government policy.

Actually that's not true because no government policy has yet determined that parents may not supervise their own children in a playground. It seems possible that the mayor and her appalling council may be in breach of article 8 of the Human Rights Act – the right to family life. A mother of three named Rebekah Makinson was quoted by reporter Neil Skinner as saying: "Banning parents from an open access playground, I feel, is a breach of our personal freedom."

She is right. This is a fundamental breach of rights, but almost as serious is the offence to common sense. The council pretends that it is forced into this position to protect children under the new vetting and barring scheme but as parents point out, the number of kids using the play areas and the range of ages means that some parents want to keep on eye on the children. Makinson said: "We have used Harwoods since I was a child and my mother stayed with me. It has always had a fantastic community atmosphere. Even with the excellent staff employed it is ridiculous to assume that three staff members can safeguard the high volume of children that currently use the playground."

I had a free-range childhood with almost no supervision and I can see the point of allowing children to play away from overprotective parents. But the critical issue here is that parents' right are being trampled on by this new atmosphere of fear and suspicion, brought about by the Independent Safeguarding Authority, a government that increasingly thinks it knows better than parents and local authorities that are keen to use any new power offered to them, however mad or tyrannical its application.

When I called the council, the press officer made the usual allegation that the reporter had got his facts wrong but then could not detail a single inaccuracy. In fact it turned out that his story was pretty much spot on. The council spokeswoman was keen to point out that the policy meant that if no parents were allowed into the two play areas it reduced the risk of adults wandering into the playground.

If parents want to watch their children they should damned well be allowed to do so. No officially sanctioned "play ranger" should have supervisory rights over a child in a public "open access" playground that in any way tops the child's parents' rights.

• Child protection
• Children
• Parents and parenting

The shocking Guardian report into the surveillance operations run by the police National Public Order Intelligence Unit makes it clear that the right of free protest in Britain now hangs in the balance, and that the very expression of opinion and attendance at meetings is enough for an individual to be categorised as an enemy of society.

Anyone now who feels strongly about climate change or the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is now liable to be labelled a "domestic extremist" to be photographed and monitored and to be subject to automatic tracking by the number plate recognition system. There are few stories that capture the parlous state of Britain's democracy like this one, and I suggest none that portray the government's institutionalised contempt for rights and its casual attitude to unfettered growth of police powers.

The outrage that will be expressed in the wake of the investigation by Paul Lewis, Rob Evans and Matthew Taylor, which is to run over the next two days, will mean nothing unless we manage to change attitudes across the board. We now live in a society whose values and instincts have been so skewed by Labour's corrosive rule that it is possible in one week to watch the leader of a fascist organisation promoting his cause on BBC TV – and the next to learn that legitimate protesters with mainstream views are regarded as "domestic extremists" and harried by the police using anti-terror laws when their cars pass through the field of automatic number plate recognition cameras.

We seem to have lost the ability to navigate these issues with anything resembling common sense, which no doubt suits the authorities. They seem to desire more and more control over the individual and the expression of his or her political views.

What is so disturbing is that this blanket surveillance has grown without proper statutory basis, let alone supervision. Laws that were designed for one thing – for instance, preventing terror and harassment – have been deployed by the police, who seem to have forgotten that it is their job to protect freedoms and rights, rather than to act as a force of repression.

The automatic number recognition camera system was built and installed without debate in parliament, without a minute of formal scrutiny and, as many of us predicted, we now find it has become a means of stalking innocent citizens.

But of course innocence is a concept that has been steadily eroded by the authorities in the last decade. It is of vital significance that when Anton Setchell, national co-ordinator of domestic extremism operations for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), was asked for his reaction he said: "Everyone who has got a criminal record did not have one once."

There you have it: everyone is a potential criminal – or domestic extremist – and so everyone becomes a legitimate target for police surveillance. The remit becomes infinite and with the advances of technology also possible.

Police officers who should be patrolling housing estates and getting to the root of such things as Britain's gang crisis are frivolously deployed making surveillance albums of protesters and stopping old men on their way to express their views at an anti-war demonstration.

This is not just about freedom and free expression, it is also about the lack of leadership in the police. Rather than tackling the tough problems of law and order it seems police would prefer to intimidate and bully those who have a right to express their views, indeed a duty to do so in a properly functioning free society. Well, you can see that it is a lot easier to shove a camera in someone's face at a demonstration, or stop people on anti-terror laws, than to address complex threats to society – but how much damage is being done by this neglect?

This is also a story of function creep and drift. The policy to extend monitoring and surveillance in Britain to this suffocating degree has been developed behind closed doors by two bodies that consistently prove themselves to be the enemy of traditional rights, the Home Office and Acpo. To all intents and purposes both operate secretly. Because Acpo is a limited company it is not even subject to freedom of information requests.

The relationship between the two bodies and the way that policies are decided in committees that mirror each other should become the subject of intense scrutiny by parliament, which has so far shown itself to be utterly powerless in setting parameters for the surveillance of legitimate demonstration and protest.

I'll say it again – unless public opinion moves on issues like this and politicians show some principled leadership, we will lose the qualities that define Britain as one of the world's oldest free societies. It would be a tragedy to allow this to happen simply through inattention.

• Police
• Protest
• Surveillance
• Terrorism policy
• Human rights
• Crime
• UK security and terrorism

If there's one minister whose every action betrays the menace of the government's intent it is Jack Straw. His malicious drive against freedom and openness is phenomenal.

In the spring he gave every impression of retreating on the government's plans to hold closed inquests, without a jury, on grounds of national security. The cross-party feeling against what was clearly an attempt to increase secrecy was so strong that the justice department announced that it was abandoning the measure.

It pays not to relax when the government appears to make a withdrawal and indeed Liberty, doing an excellent job of scrutiny, has established that unnoticed clauses added to the coroners and justice bill will allow an inquest to be suspended and replaced by a secret inquiry. These amendments have exactly the same effect as the abandoned measures.

Following the precedents set out in the Inquiries Act, which granted vast powers to ministers over public inquiries with barely an objection in parliament, the coroners and justice bill allows for an inquiry to be instigated by a minister in order to protect the government. The minister could then restrict disclosure and the publication of documents, and remove evidence from final report, in other words they have total control over the proceedings and the verdict of what would have been a public inquest.

National security will be the pretext for triggering this secret inquiry but of course everyone appreciates that Straw is simply creating measures that protect government and the civil service from, for instance, allegations about soldiers being poorly equipped. For ministers like Straw the concept of national security is indistinguishable from their own protection.

These clauses capture all that it is rotten and deceitful about the government's attitude to the public. They place secrecy and ministerial power above the right of the public to know what is happened, especially in the case of deaths that may have been caused by the incompetence of the state.

Isabella Sankey of Liberty said, It is thoroughly perverse for a government that has spent over a decade lecturing the public about victims' rights to attempt to exclude bereaved families from open justice. When will New Labour's obsession with secret courts and parallel legal systems end? There is no accountability without transparency.

I could not have put it better myself.

• Jack Straw
• Law
• House of Lords
• Criminal justice
• Military

The government's climbdown on proposals that the police should keep innocent people's DNA for between six and 12 years should not be mistaken for a change of heart, nor should we celebrate this as a victory for article 8, the right to privacy, of the Human Rights Act.

This is simply a retreat in the face of a predicted defeat in the Lords: it is clear that the Home Office will come back with fresh proposals in yet another Labour criminal justice bill in the new parliamentary session, which the Human Rights Act will be equally powerless to prevent. So I am afraid the triumphant notes being sounded by human rights campaigners are premature.

If there was a genuine change in government thinking after the Marper case was adjudicated at the European court of human rights (ECHR) – which found against the practice of storing the DNA of innocent people in a unanimous decision – the Home Office would not have encouraged the frantic collection of DNA by all police forces. One way or another the police and the Home Office are determined to extend the world's largest DNA database, despite its inbuilt racial bias and its profound attack on the concept of innocence, and we should not be reassured by victory in this skirmish.

Knowledge of the Home Office statement on the subject is all you need to have to understand that the project remains a live ambition. Its spokesman said:

We have now completed a public consultation on proposals to ensure the right people are on the database as well as considering when people should come off.

Those proposals were grounded in the research and allowed us to respond to the judgment of the European court of human rights both swiftly and effectively. The government will take the most expedient route to address the issue as soon as possible in order to comply with the European court's judgment.

That is pure waffle.

If ministers and civil servants were indeed anxious to comply with the ECHR judgment, there is absolutely nothing stopping the Home Office from instructing police to stop the practice of retaining the DNA of the innocent people. That is what compliance demands. Instead, they are hoping to finesse the situation in a new law.

"The government must take this opportunity to end their fudge on DNA," said Chris Huhne for the Liberal Democrats. "The innocent should be removed from the database immediately, no ifs, no buts." Of course that is right and until that principle has been either unambiguously established by the Home Office, or there is a law which proscribes the practice and protects the biological essence of the innocence, the bunting and fairy lights of human rights campaigners should remain in the cupboard.

• DNA database
• Police
• Human rights
• Civil liberties
• Surveillance

When dealing with the Home Office you become aware of the dim, dogged nature of a primitive life-form. Last week the department which runs the UK Border Agency issued a statement which appeared to suggest that it was retreating on the issue of gene tests being used to determine race and origin. Science and Nature magazines both attacked the plan, the former by quoting scientists and geneticists who were horrified at the idea of untested science being used by unknown scientists to decide a person's race and origin, and therefore future.

It seems possible that the UK Border Agency, which, incidentally,regards itself as an enforcement agency and is now stopping yachtsman in British waters with armed patrols, has completely lost its marbles on this issue. Having appeared to announce a suspension of the nationality DNA test – known by the Hitlerian title "the Human Provenance Pilot"– it now says that the project will go ahead but that the result will not be used to determine someone's fate.

And I am the Queen of the Nile.

The ever reliable Register says that DNA fingerprints and isotope analysis will continue to be collected from asylum seekers, but that according to a Home Office spokesman "they will not be used for evidential purposes on individual cases."

The original memo on the UK Borders site said: "The nationality swapping – Isotope analysis and DNA testing process has been has been temporarily suspended and the instruction withdrawn. Officers will be notified when the process resumes."

It now reads, "Alterations have been made to the nationality swapping – Isotope analysis and DNA testing process. This process continues to operate. The present instruction has been withdrawn whilst amendments are made."

In its most recent editorial, Nature said "The idea that genetic variability follows man-made national boundaries is absurd. Cross-border migration is common throughout the world: Y-Chromosome analysis can easily be thrown off by a distant male ancestor...Geneticists, and indeed all scientists, should decry the plan and make it clear that the science does not support it."

It would be good to know what the Conservatives think about this issue? Damian Green?

• DNA database
• Immigration and asylum
• Refugees

Sometimes things go right. Yesterday Jacqui Smith, the former home secretary, rose in parliament to apologise for nominating her main home in West Midlands as a second home; and a report was published vindicating Damian Green after the MP's arrest last November.

Admittedly you had to concentrate very hard to hear the apology in Smith's speech; and of course Green has received no formal apology after his homes and offices were searched by police, who went so far as to turn over his marital bed, a violation that Green is only now allowed to speak about.

There was an approximate sense of justice being seen to be done, which is certainly gratifying when you consider the seriousness of the offence to parliament, as well as to Green, and doubtless the coincidence struck him as sweet.

It is possible that we will have cause to celebrate many more small triumphs as the Labour era comes to an end and the extent of the damage inflicted by the government on the constitution and public liberty are properly assessed. (A good inventory can be found at the back of AC Grayling's excellent Liberty in the Age of Terror) Before the Conservative party conference I questioned the party's commitment to liberty, but I have to concede that there is some sign that David Cameron has taken on board the arguments being made here and elsewhere. In a part of his conference speech that was not well covered he said: "To be British is to be sceptical of authority and the powers-that-be. That's why ID cards, 42 days and Labour's surveillance state are so utterly unacceptable, and why we will sweep the whole rotten edifice away."

Apart from a speech he made in the House of Commons about 42 days, this is the third time he has gone on record about liberty and privacy, which is important and signals that a change of government will at least stop some of the worst excesses of the executive. But much more is needed.

The first point is that the opposition needs to map the database state, possibly by drawing on the report done by Professor Ross Anderson for the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. This found that the United Kingdom had become has become the "most invasive surveillance state, and the worst at protecting privacy, of any western democracy". It concluded that a quarter of public sector databases are either disproportionate, run without consent, have no legal basis, or have major privacy or operational problems.

So much is happening, and so fast, that some kind of formal assessment is necessary, followed by clear statements on particular issues. It is time perhaps for Green, the shadow minister for immigration, to consider the implications on privacy of the e-Borders scheme that will soon require each one of us to supply 50–odd pieces of information before we travel abroad – effectively the first exit visa of any western democracy. It is an expensive bureaucratic scheme that has been smuggled into law during general legislative panics about terror and immigration.

Some of the most important work on re-establishing respect for individual rights and privacy needs to be done at the local level. Police and local authorities have been abusing surveillance systems and the Ripa (regulation of investigatory powers) laws to a point that exceeded even the government's expectations. The latest crop of stories tell us, for example, that the number of cars photographed by Bedfordshire police in a month has almost doubled from 2007 to 2009. Heart radio station says automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras photographed 2,781,692 license plates in 2009. In March 2008 they photographed 1,607,163 and in 2007 1,589,189. These strike me as incredible numbers especially when you consider the ANPR network is recording nationally. And yet of course the system was never debated in parliament.

In Yorkshire we learn that police have spied on 500 people in the last year. In Scotland the number of surveillance cameras has doubled in the last six years. The latest report from Scotland by Professor Mike Press says the policy is "politically motivated and ineffectual". And so it goes on. Everyday the statistics of the database state pour forth.

The deep effect Labour legislation has had on the national life cannot be underestimated but the trouble is that talk of the "database" or "surveillance state" tends to let local authorities and police forces off the hook. So many of the important decisions are being taken at the local level by people whose desire for control and intrusion has been enabled by Labour's laws and the general erosion of respect for the individual.

To redress this is a much bigger job than the few sentences in David Cameron's speech suggest. Still, they are welcome start and we have a clear six months to press him on all this.

• David Cameron
• Damian Green
• Jacqui Smith
• Immigration and asylum
• Data protection
• UK security and terrorism
• Surveillance

Labour stripped away many civil liberties, and we should expect the Conservatives to do the same

There are good reasons to feel sympathy for Gordon Brown with the Sun's calculated sabotage of his come back speech, Andrew Marr's questions about his personal health and Adam Boultonneedling him about the pre-election TV debate. But every time I'm tempted to feel sorry for him I remind myself of what Labour has done and what it plans to do.

When Brown suggested workhouses for single teenage mothers and intervention for the 50,000 families that the state has determined are dysfunctional, there was no dissent at conference because despite the catastrophic performance of government in so many areas the party really believes it should have the power to break up families and interfere with people's personal lives. It is interesting that it hasn't occurred to any of the commentators who obsess about Labour's death throes to remark on these Stalinist policies or the vindictive look that swept the prime minister's face as he talked about the 50,000 families.

To be honest, it is difficult not to despise Labour for what it has done to this country – the way it has distorted the constitution, seized personal information and granted itself powers to intervene in matters which were once the unchallenged domain of personal choice.

But any pleasure one feels at the party and leader's discomfort is tempered by a strong suspicion that the Conservatives will follow more or less the same path. The Sun's defection was proceeded by the smarter parasites from think-tanks like Demos, which is lifting its skirt in an indecent way at the Tory conference next week, and by people like Matthew Taylor, formerly of Blair's No 10 and now the RSA and the sinister Julian le Grand of the London School of Economics, also formerly of No 10, who of course suggested that the state should forcibly marry pregnant teenagers.

These characters long ago sensed the flow of power from one party to the other and have hopped like so many fleas on to the new host. The fact that someone like Le Grand is granted any kind of hearing at all the Conservative conference, even though a fringe event, is a rather bad sign.

Indeed, the big nightmare for anyone who worries about the state of liberty and privacy in the United Kingdom is that a Tory government will be the one to really make use of the laws fashioned by Labour over the last dozen years. Despite so many opportunities, neither Cameron or any member of his frontbench has properly distanced the party from the intrusive patterns set by Labour legislation.

Next week we will find out if the Conservatives are going to create a genuine alternative to the trends of the last decade or whether New Labour's statism has become the norm in British politics

• Conservative conference 2009
• Conservative conference
• Conservatives
• Gordon Brown

A Home Office experiment with the DNA of asylum seekers to establish their likely race and place of origin is causing outrage and alarm among scientists.

Sir Alec Jeffreys, the inventor of DNA fingerprinting, called the human provenance pilot project, run by the UK Border Agency "naive and scientifically flawed". In an email to Science magazine, he said:

The Borders Agency is clearly making huge and unwarranted assumptions about population structure in Africa; the extensive research needed to determine population structure and the ability or otherwise of DNA to pinpoint ethnic origin in this region simply has not been done. Even if it did work (which I doubt), assigning a person to a population does not establish nationality – people move! The whole proposal is naive and scientifically flawed.

The human provenance pilot began two weeks ago and uses mitochondrial DNA, the DNA passed in the maternal line, and Y chromosomes from the paternal line to determine whether an asylum seeker comes from, say, Somalia or another region of the horn of Africa.

One of the most controversial aspects of the projects is the use of isotope analysis of hair or fingernail samples to match the isotopes in a person's tissue with the levels of the same isotopes known to be in the environment of a particular region. This technique has been used to gauge the likely origin of murder victims who cannot be identified by other means. Christopher Phillips and his colleagues at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain used samples to guess the origin of the Madrid train bombers.

This is the extremely inexact science of inference. For example, if they were to take my DNA, the UK Border Agency scientists would likely conclude that the characteristics of my mitochondrial DNA suggest I came from the western Pyrenees or Finland, two areas where you find a high percentage of people belonging to a genetic group called Velda, of which I am a member. If you looked at the isotopes in some of my body tissue you might conclude that I was German because I spent my early years from birth in Germany.

Mark Thomas, a geneticist from University College London, considers the human provenance pilot "horrifying" because it is working on methods that are imprecise. Phillips objects to the way he was consulted by the UK forensic service because they did not disclose how they were going to apply his techniques. "I thought it was for forensic purposes, not border control," he says. Jane Evans, head of Science-based Archaeology at the National Environment Research Council Isotope Geosciences Laboratory in Nottingham says: "It worries me as a scientist that actual people's lives are being influenced based on these methods."

The full range of the condemnation can be found on the Science Magazine website. The UK Border Agency has not yet responded to requests to identify the scientists it is working with, cited the research it is using or even disclosed the laboratory where this work is done. It says it is using the genetic and isotope testing in connection with linguistic tests given to people it suspects of lying about their origins.

This story shows how science can be used doubtfully by agencies that are unaccountable and appear heedless of opinion in the scientific community. More significant, perhaps, is that people are being forced to give up their biological essence so that it can be used against their interests in an imprecise procedure that allows for no appeal.

How long will it be before the national DNA database becomes the playground for second-rate scientists who work under the protective secrecy of the Home Office? What conclusions are they perhaps already drawing from the genetic profiles of millions of people on the database? I for one do not believe the Home Office is capable of resisting the temptations offered by this opportunity.

The human provenance project is not only poor science and morally wrong, it is also indicative of a disturbing sense of entitlement among civil servants who never have to account for their actions. If there is one principle every party should sign up to it is that DNA has nothing to tell us about a person's race or origin.

The Human Provenance Pilot should be abandoned now.

• Immigration and asylum
• Refugees
• Human rights
• DNA database
• Civil liberties