Adam Smith Institute

The front-page of yesterday’s Sunday Times revealed that the government intends to require the production of a passport by anyone purchasing a mobile phone. The reason? They want to know who owns every phone used in the UK, so that they can electronically track all of us, all of the time.

Even when no call is being made, mobile phones send out a signal to the nearest telephone masts, making it possible to work out the phone’s location. The government intends to link this information with the DVLA’s car registration database and the police’s automatic license plate identification system, to make keeping tabs on us that little bit easier. The government also intends to create a new database which will store the details of every single electronic communication made in the UK.

It really makes me wonder what kind of a country we are living in. Will the current government ever realize the George Orwell did NOT intend 1984 to be used as an instruction manual? Somehow, I suspect not.

Instead, the government is bound to say that only the guilty have anything to fear and that unless we have something to hide, we should all march (or should that be goose-step) happily down the road to electronically-tagged serfdom , safe in the knowledge that Big Brother is on the side of the angels. That’s the excuse that all tyrants use, and I don’t expect our ones to be any different.

The problem is that it isn’t true. The very existence of that kind of information and that degree of centralized power is a threat – regardless of the intentions that lie behind it. These powers will be abused and the data’s security will be compromised. It is so predictable that you would be a fool not to see it coming.

Everyone who values freedom, regardless of their political affiliation, should fight these proposals and others like them every step of the way. It is not just a matter of practicality or expense: liberty matters in and of itself. We are not the possessions of government, and it’s high time we reminded them of that.

Hat-tip to Chris Weston, the comic-strip artist behind the fantastic image accompanying this blog.

Fascinating stuff this, like a press release from the Howard League on how we should treat criminals.

I'm sitting in Oslo having lunch with the director general of the Norwegian prison service – Kristin Bolgen Bronebakk – and we are discussing "Scandinavian exceptionalism". In other words, why is it that Finland, Sweden and Norway in particular, have much lower rates of imprisonment than other European countries?

Isn't that wonderful? They've managed to design a system where those who employ their rapacity upon their fellow citizens do not end up warehoused, locked in a cell for 23 hours a day, in a Victorian building. Perhaps there's something we might learn from this system, how do they do it?

Oslo had the highest rate per person in Scandinavia in terms of reported crimes, with 90 reported crimes per 1,000.

Copenhagen had 50 crimes reported per 1,000 and Stockholm had 79.

In New York, there were 22 reported crimes per 1,000 inhabitants.

As economists have endlessly pointed out, it's not just punishment for crime that reduces crime. It's a combination of the severity of the sentence, the conditions of serving it plus the liklihood of detection and conviction. All those together add up to the expected punishment for a particular action.

And whatever else the Norwegian version of social democracy might have to tell us here it seems clear that not locking up criminals does not reduce crime.

So that's one more thing that we know not to do then.

Jacqui Smith has revealed that the government is considering creating a single, centralized database containing records of all telephone numbers called, time and location of calls, websites visited and e-mail addresses used by UK citizens. If this goes ahead, it will be yet another incursion by the state into the private sphere of the individual.

The reactions from Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have been swift and correct. Dominic Grieve, the Shadow Home Secretary, said: "The Government must justify the case for any such massive increase in state acquisition, sharing and retention of data, spell out the safeguards to prevent abuse and – given its appalling record – explain how it will protect the integrity of any database holding sensitive personal data.” Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said: "Ministers simply can't be trusted with confidential data of this sort, as it has shown again and again."

These disagreements are focussed on concerns for the practicality of the scheme. In fact, most of the arguments I have heard and read on this scheme ignore the disturbing ideology behind it. It would be nice to hear politicians refer to the principles of freedom and liberty, instead of simply banging on about the propensity the government seems to have for losing things (relevant as that is). Even if the scheme could catch more criminals and the government was able to protect the information, the essential point still stands that a centralized database of this sort gives powers to the state that they should simply never be allowed to have.

There is a great appetite for greater freedom in the UK, but no major party that is offering to give it to us to any meaningful degree. One reason for this is the ubiquitous demand for politicians to solve all problems and the delusion that leads them to claim that they can. When power is finally taken from Gordon Brown's Stalinist hands, there will be a real opportunity to roll back the frontiers of the state. However, the very real risk is that there will be no one in government with the will or gumption to do it.