Did you know that, under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, one requires advance permission from the police to make any kind of protest with one kilometre of Parliament?

The same Act now brings the prospect of a 12-month jail sentence for any person who protests at any one of Britain's military bases. The ID card bill, finally allowed through by the House of Lords last week was originally promised to be voluntary. Now it is 'voluntary to be rolled out alongside the renewal of passports', meaning that you will have to have one if you wish to to travel abroad after 2009. On the basis that that group would include most of the UK population, that sounds compulsory to me.

Slowly, the government is ripping the last civil liberties from every one of us and the UK citizen, notionally a free man or woman, at liberty to live as they please, is now seen by the state as a potential enemy, somebody to be mistrusted. The war on terror is a godsend to the Government. Since time immemorial, governments have yearned to take more control of the lives of their electorate and dampen any disquiet but would not dare to for fear of the uproar that would undoubtedly result. Now, the reason that 'it's for your own good' is being used to justify all kinds of surveillance and quashing of differing opinions. Even worse, we seem to be sleepwalking towards this state of legalised servitude.

That 'beacon of Western democracy' that we so wish to export to the supposedly repressed people of the Islamic world is flickering and dying before our very eyes.

Last song on the iPod: Simon and Garfunkel - Homeward Bound