The next person to mention in my presence: Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, or the “insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms,” is surely going to regret it. I have never been more heartily sick and tired of the whole “civil liberties” industry following last week’s events where, after an admittedly unwelcome measure was passed in the House of Commons, a Conservative frontbencher with whom we have virtually nothing in common went off on some vain flight of fancy, and it was somehow deemed inappropriate for Liberal Democrats to oppose him.

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.