THE little known campaigning group, Fight For The Right To Take Pictures Of Police Officers (FFTRTTPOPO), will be holding its regular monthly meeting this week.

However, the planned presentation, entitled “Digital or 35mm? Making the most of your all-night vigil outside New Scotland Yard”, has now been shifted to item 2 on the agenda, making way for a new item which will undoubtedly feature the term “police state”…

Many years ago, as a student, I made the mistake, in the heat of an argument, of describing Thatcher’s Britain during the miners’ strike as a “police state”. A girl who was present at the time, and who hailed from a South American regime whose citizens knew something about the reality of a police state, snorted derisively before setting me straight. I was suitably chastened.

Since then I’ve often repeated her very sound reasoning that describing democratic countries like the UK as a police state isn’t just inaccurate – it diminishes the plight of those in other countries actually living in fear of arbitrary arrest and prison without due process.

Today’s Times editorial makes the same point well, so I’ve reproduced it in its entirety:

Anyone who has ever lived in a genuine police state will know that it is a poor description of Britain. The use of the term by Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, both trivialises the stifling lack of freedom in some nondemocratic nations and misstates the argument about civil liberties in this country (see page 14).

There are, indeed, serious issues of civil liberties on which, too often, the Government has been on the wrong side. The demand to hold terror suspects for 42 days was made with only the most feeble attempt to supply a case. Officials have been cavalier with the use of data and antiterrorism legislation has been used to impound the assets of Icelandic banks. Incidents of this sort undermine the confidence of the public in the quest to combat terrorism.

There are also legitimate reasons for, respectively, not permitting the use of intercept evidence, for not wishing to compile a DNA database or for derogating the extensive use of CCTV in public places. But these issues need to be taken on their merits. The compilation of DNA data needs to be weighed against the crimes solved as a result, the surveillance weighed against the increasing difficulty of being a terrorist in Britain.

It is true that a respect for a liberal heritage is precisely what separates democracy from tyranny. To undermine liberty in the name of protecting a way of life is a contradiction in terms. But that does not mean that the step from the State protecting the citizen to the State protecting itself is a short one. In a noisy polity characterised by a functioning Parliament, a free press and an independent judiciary, liberty is nothing like as fragile as that.