Littlejohn on liberty

Guy Aitchison (Bristol, OK): On the major issues of the day, Richard Littlejohn is almost guaranteed to take what I think is the most pernicious line possible. So I was surprised, and a little unsettled, to stumble across his agreeable polemic in today's Daily Mail. "Skating towards a Police State.." contains Littlejohn's reaction to the news that police chiefs want the power to take DNA samples off people for minor offences. Littlejohn contemptuously quotes one of the main advocates, Inspector Thomas Huntley, who suggests that failing to take a sample "could be seen as giving the impression that an individual who commits a non-recordable offence could not be a repeat offender." He rightly rips into the absurdity of this reasoning with his usual high flung rhetoric. Since "non-recordable offences" can mean anything from not wearing a seat belt to letting your dog foul on the pavement, "How are the police supposed to know that the little old lady allowing her poodle to poop in a public place won't go on to commit another Dunblane massacre? Or that the spotty youth casually dropping a KitKat wrapper in the gutter may not be the next Yorkshire Ripper. You never can tell. Better to be safe than sorry. Open wide." As Littlejohn correctly points out (and there's something I never thought I'd say), what the police now propose requires a "giant leap in terms of liberty and presumption of innocence". And yet another undemocratic move towards a surveillance state. But I can't help thinking that this is slightly inconsistent with Littlejohn's pathological hatred of, what he calls, "yumen rights". Isn't strengthening our human rights, and in particular our right to privacy, the only way of avoiding Littlejohn's nightmare vision of a police state, given that we are not going to go back to the days of Dixon in Dock Green?