Personally, I was annoyed enough to join millions of others on the march against the war in Iraq – now it’s time to hold them to account.

I’m not so sure how I will react if and when I get the orders from the Government to present myself at the interrogation centre in nearby Derby and hand over more personal information than is currently demanded from sex offenders.  I’m not certain I’m ready to join Simon Hughes in jail for refusing an ID card.

I’ve never yet been arrested, so my DNA is not amongst the millions of samples wrongly held by the Police.

I have to queue for longer than ever in my surviving local Post Office or the one in the city centre since many so others have been shut.

Now I’m no longer even safe in my own home.  

If I become a debtor – or if my local council again wrongly summonses me for Council Tax non-payment, and sends the summons to an address I have told them I no longer live at – bailiffs have been given new powers to break into my house, use violence against me and physically restrain me.

And if somone accuses me of some nefarious internet or computer crime, the police don’t even need to knock on my door or get a warrant, before remotely accessing my computer and reading my files.  And this is on top of other mad Government plans to track my every move on the internet and every phone call and text I send.

In a long posting last week, James Graham examined the state of play with the current government and civil liberties.  His conclusion – it’s terrifying, and all right thinking people need to inform themselves about what’s going on and then get angry.  Specifically, he said, take these steps:

1. Bookmark the Convention for Modern Liberty website and sign up to their news alerts.
2. Attend a Convention event, either the one in London, one of the regional and national events happening on the same day or a local event. If there is no event happening in your area, start organising one!
3. Join a pro-democracy and human rights organisation. Whichever tickles your fancy (although, obviously, joining Unlock Democracy helps pay my wages!) and get involved.
4. Join or set up a local group. It doesn’t have to be affiliated to anything, and it needn’t be anything more than you and a couple of your mates to start off with.
5. Write to your MP and ask them their starter for ten: “what do you think about the dillution of civil liberties over the past couple of decades and what do you intend to do about it in 2009.” And keep writing to them.
6. Go to the Taking Liberties exhibition at the British Library if you can, before it closes at the beginning of March.
7. Tell everyone you know to do the same.

Couldn’t have put it better myself.

Starting from a position of puzzlement over the extent to which civil liberties seem to dominate political discourse, I have now come to see the whole charade as an excuse on the part of self-indulgent and out-of-touch politicians for not talking about the issues that really matter to the electorate. To the ordinary man and woman in the street, freedom is paramount – but it is a freedom which has nothing whatsoever to do with detention without charge, ID cards, CCTV, or any of the other oppressive instruments of the big-brother police state (which doesn’t exist by the way).

The sense in which many people find their freedoms curtailed on an everyday basis is that they are obliged to work long hours each day, maybe with a difficult or cynical employer. That higher food and fuel bills are starting to hurt their ability to hold body and soul together. That they increasingly find themselves facing impossible decisions balancing work, life, and family. What they are less concerned about, I would suggest, is the prospect of being arrested and imprisoned for 42 days without charge, especially if they have done nothing wrong. In fact if they saw a policeman on their patch at all, they might be pleasantly surprised.

But no, to a certain breed of dull-witted politician, Magna Carta is what it’s all about. The level of unthinking inertia is such that they forget – as they drone on about “hard-won freedoms” and “slippery slopes” – that today’s technological era hardly bears comparison with anything that happened in the previous century, never mind in another age altogether. And they don’t come much more unimaginative than the member for Haltemprice and Howden who has now embarked at considerable public expense upon a political stunt that, when the dust has settled, will prove precisely nothing.

Of all the lazy and incoherent things that have been said regarding the forthcoming contest, the most absurd is this notion that we may declare the by-election to be fought over the sole issue of 42 days detention without charge. In truth, there can never be any such thing as a single-issue by-election, for the simple reason that, once elected, the victor will have to face a decision regarding each and every division which comes before Parliament. For example, Saint Martin of Bell voted on a total of 620 divisions during his term of office – strange to tell, they were not all regarding the issue of undeclared donations to MPs.

Logically speaking, if there is one issue the Haltemprice and Howden by-election will not be about, it is 42 days because we’ve just had that vote. Equally spurious is the idea that a tiny region of North-East England can be relied upon to speak for the entire nation on any topic. In fact whatever combination of candidates were to stand in the by-election, and whatever the result may turn out to be, nothing whatsoever will be proved regarding 42 days or civil liberties in general. Yet David Davis would have us all buy into this fantasy contest of him versus the government, when everyone knows perfectly well that Labour (who polled 12.7% last time) cannot possibly win.

So what of Davis’s wider record? On the issue of detention without charge, his record is impeccable (though I’m struggling now to recall any occasion when he has publicly and unequivocally condemned arrangements at Guantanamo Bay – has he ever?). He has also been a stern critic of DNA databases and surveillance cameras (which I happen to think are terrific crime prevention measures!). And of course he has championed the right to trial by jury (now that really is the most stupid idea ever – your whole life hangs in the balance, so why not ask twelve guys who have just stumbled out of the pub to decide your fate?).

Davis voted in favour of the Iraq war (obviously), opposes the Human Rights Act (obviously), and is a strong advocate of the death penalty – what would Shami Chakrabarti think? He is also a staunch defender of free speech . . . well, at least so long as you don’t intend to poke fun at Christianity (he voted to retain blasphemy legislation, both in 2005 and 2008 – make sense of that if you can). And last, but not least, he’s a Conservative! Why on earth are we supporting this guy (because by withholding a candidate, we plainly are in effect supporting Davis whatever the official line may be)?

Nick Clegg has clearly been party to a stitch-up here and, in so doing, has either been exceedingly clever in a way that I can’t quite understand, or has made a grave error of judgement. Because on the face of it, we have rolled over and allowed a man to champion the cause of liberty whose track record should be enough to make any liberal gag. And in attempting to justify our own position, we have been obliged to buy into this highly strained concept of the single-issue parliamentary election which, in my view, is making us look rather foolish and disingenuous.

David Davis is just about the last person I would choose to defend my liberties, and we should never have given him a pass to set up his stall as self-styled freedom-fighter on behalf of the nation. In the absence of any credible Liberal Democrat candidate, I shall be backing Miss Great Britain for Haltemprice and Howden – I hear she has some terrific . . . erm . . . policies. But I’m afraid that the former shadow Home Secretary simply doesn’t stack up.

* Laurence Boyce is a Lib Dem member and occasional contributor to Lib Dem Voice.