Tom Griffin (London, OK): The database state is moving forward at an increasing pace, but it is not inevitable, and there are far better ways of dealing with the identity challenges of the information age. That was the conclusion that emerged from a Rowntrees Governance Seminar on the subject at Westminster on Wednesday.

In the opening presentation Phil Booth of NO2ID defined the database state as "using computers to manage society by watching people."

He suggested that the Government has lost the argument on every front, but was developing a narrative that the database state is inevitable. Stressing that those who oppose the Government's plans are not Luddites, he said that, in many cases, their technical awareness exceeds that of the Home Office. Booth outlined three approaches that offer an alternative way forward.

• Information privity: a new sort of enforceable property right, with some of
  the features of confidentiality, but extending to all personal information.
  Analagous to leases of property or licenses of copyright, which occur
  through a chain of contracts - each of which gives specific, limited rights
  to the recipient, no rights to those outside the chain and direct redress
  against any infringer.
• Authentication/verification rather than identification: In many cases it is only necessary to verify one particular fact about a person. This can be achieved by a market of overlapping identity tokens, rather than putting all our eggs in one basket as with a centralised database.
• Precisely targeting problems: for example by allowing people to freeze their own credit records, a radical departure from the database state approach which has already been applied in the United States.

Booth stressed that individual control, choice and consent were vital principles: "In an information society things done to your data can have as much effect as things done to you in person. We have to get this right now."

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Could victory in the Glenrothes by-election set the seal on Gordon Brown's political comeback? Labour pollsters have told the Prime Minister that they will win on the back of his handling of the banking crisis, according to the BBC.

As the Sunday Times noted at the weekend, the credit crunch has prompted a reassessment of the viability of Scottish independence. Brown himself has not been afraid to make the argument, citing the UK bailout of HBOS and Royal Bank of Scotland:

"We were able to act decisively with £37bn. That would not have been possible for a Scottish administration.

"We've seen the problems in Iceland, we've seen the problems in Ireland, we were able to put the whole strength of the United Kingdom's resources behind these two banks and I think it's important because I value the Scottish banking tradition, I think that everybody does." 

Whether it is Brown's interests to preserve the Scottish banking tradition is open to question. Many now believe that the Downing Street-arranged merger of HBOS with Lloyds-TSB is unnecessary. The deal will inevitably weaken Edinburgh's status as a financial centre, and thereby, incidentally, the case for Scottish independence. One cannot help but wonder whether this was a factor in Brown's pursuit of this option.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): CiF has launched a new Henry Porter blog. It opens with a post on  Ken Macdonald's valedictory lecture as the outgoing Director of Public Prosecutions. He warns, and he should know, "we should take very great care to imagine the world we are creating before we build it". I'm going to reproduce the whole of the section on Terror because it is so strong and well said.

But first, two things about the speech and one about Henry P. I'm struck that Macdonald says we should imagine the world we are creating. oD is about to run an article by Tom Nairn on globalisation that discusses the power and importance of imagination. Macdonald uses it in a matter of fact way, and this is right. It is a critical aspect of our politics and culture, and an explosive one to be treated with respect.

Second, the speech is a must read simply because it is so clear and so well set out. It tells us the history of the development of an independent public prosecution service. I read the papers a lot but I never understood what had been done, or why. A really profound change in our constitution took place with no effective public debate. Once again our parliamentary system and its attendent media has proved cretinous. You don't read speeches like this from our politicians either. This one is about saying clearly what is meant, setting out a case and how it came about. It's not a seeking for influence with the tabloids, or full of windy rhetoric or tortured positioning laced with pseudo-show-off references.

Now for Henry - our most consistent critic of the world that Macdonald warns us against and which is being created (imagined and implemented) as we blog. He is now adding to his Observer columns this new, regular on-line service. Also we are working with him and others on a project to bring everyone together in the new year - to debate all the implications of liberty in the modern context as our fundamental rights and freedoms are threatened; perhaps, if the outgoing Director of Public Prosecutions is right, irreversibly.   

Terror

As I near my conclusion, let me, in my final public speech as DPP, repeat my call for level headedness and for legislative restraint in an age of very dangerous movements.

We need to take very great care not to fall into a way of life in which freedom's back is broken by the relentless pressure of a security State.

Over the last thirty years technology has given each of us, as individual citizens, enormous gifts of access to information and knowledge. Sometimes it seems as if everything in the world is at our fingertips and this doubtless has made our lives immeasurably richer.

But technology also gives the State enormous powers of access to knowledge and information about each one of us. And the ability to collect and store it at will. Every second of every day, in everything we do.

Of course modern technology is of critical importance to the struggle against serious crime and, used wisely, it can and will protect us.

But we need to understand that it is in the nature of State power that decisions taken in the next few months and years about how the State may use these powers, and to what extent, are likely to be irreversible. They will be with us forever. And they in turn will be built upon.

So we should take very great care to imagine the world we are creating before we build it. We might end up living with something we can't bear.

Of course our country faces very significant risks.

And I have enormous admiration for all those in the police and in the security and intelligence services who work with such energy and verve to combat those risks.

The prosecutors in my Counter Terrorism Division have similarly distinguished themselves time and again since we set it up it three years ago.

I've not forgotten, indeed it is salutary to remember, that when I took up my appointment five years ago, some people questioned my suitability on the grounds that I had, in my career at the Bar, defended terrorists of almost every hue.

Of course I was not ashamed of this. Indeed I was very proud of it. Defence lawyers must never judge their clients and there is no hierarchy of righteousness in criminal advocacy.

But I made clear, nevertheless, that my period as Director of Public Prosecutions would be accompanied by a relentless prosecutorial struggle against terrorism. And so it has been.

From the start that struggle has been absolutely grounded in due process and pursued with full respect for our historical norms and for our liberal constitution. We have not feared fairness.

We all know that this has worked. Our conviction rate is in excess of 90%- unmatched in the fair trial world. We have a guilty plea rate of over 40%.

So we have been absolutely right to resist, whenever they have been suggested, special courts, vetted judges and all the other paraphernalia of paranoia.

Of course, you can have the Guantanamo model.

You can have the model which says that we cannot afford to give people their rights, that rights are too expensive because of the nature of the threats we are facing.

Or you can say, as I prefer to, that our rights are priceless. That the best way to face down those threats is to strengthen our institutions rather than to degrade them.

It is difficult to see who will maintain a cool head if governments don't. Or who will protect our Constitution if governments unwittingly disarm it.

The response to terror is multi-layered. It has to be that way.

In some contexts it is dealt with geopolitically, by engaging relations between sovereign states.

In others it is disrupted by intelligence and by other interventions. In still others the response must plainly be military.

But on the streets of our country, violent law breaking is dealt with as crime. It is taken through the courts as crime and it is confronted with in accordance with our Constitution.

In all the debates that have raged back and forth, Britain has been absolutely right, and our government has been absolutely right, to hold fast to this course.

We would do well not to insult ourselves and all of our institutions and our processes of law in the face of these medieval delusions.

As I say, the response to terror is multi-layered. But it should not include surrender.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Writing in the Guardian today, Paul Myners who was drafted in by Brown to oversee the government's efforts to save our financial institutions, proclaims

by taking decisive action domestically, and by leading the debate on a new approach internationally, the UK will remain a world leader in financial services. The fundamentals that underpinned our successes over the last decade have not changed - a talented workforce, world-class infrastructure and an internationalism and openness unmatched by other financial centres.

Meanwhile, Nelson Schwarts in the New York Times reveals how the US viewed the City, 

In recent years, as Wall Street boomed, Americans often dismissed Europe as a place for languorous meals and vacations, not economic innovation.

London remained a financial hub, of course, but it was often treated dismissively — as a flashy aberration pumped up by petrodollars from Russia and the Gulf, an exception to the otherwise somnolent Continent.

It's an especially interesting read because the NYT is ambivalent as to whether Britain is now to be regared as part of a European response or not.

Mike Small (Fife, Bella Caledonia): Last week's lost cause is this week's cause celebre. Mr Bean - virtually laughed out of office two weeks ago - is this week's giant of fiscal rectitude bestriding the world stage like a colossus of economic management. Inconvenient truths like the role New Labour played in the deregulation of goods and services, the 'liberation' of the Bank of England or support for the policy of basing your economy on spiralling housing prices, are swept aside in the glib wave of back-slapping that is sweeping the political commentariat.

The media is fickle, not feral.

Gleefully Jim Murphy the new Scottish Secretary mocks the SNP with reference to the 'arc of insolvency', a reference to the 'arc of prosperity' that the SNP have used to describe Iceland, Ireland and Norway. The problem with Labour's new found chutzpah is that they are treading on thin ice. The markets are faltering, the terrain unpredictable. Just as the SNP's original triumvirate of Ireland, Iceland and Norway was a too-convenient set, it equally fails as an example of why Scotland must be held to the Union. Norway is doing fine in the financial crisis, Iceland is not. The scale and impact of crisis has little or nothing to do with the size and constitutional make-up of the country involved.