"Hundreds more town hall staff to get police-style powers" says the Daily Telegraph. And all at huge cost which will add loads more onto Council Tax Bills, including, no doubt, the appointment of some over-paid Jobsworth to supervise them, another to look after their elf 'n safety and yet another to produce a PR plan for them.....The development under this Labour Government of a huge array of people and the means to spy upon and harrass their fellow citizens should come as no surprise, however, for it is, and ever has been, the wont of Socialist Governments to seek to control the lives of people and then to try and enforce that control by large dollops of snooping on them.

Winston Churchill understood  this well. In the 1945 General Election he made that very point about Socialist Governments. Sadly he made it at about the worst possible time he could just as the UK was coming off the back of the Second World War in which Socialist Ministers (most of whom were, by comparison with the present bunch of wastrels, decent , patriotic, if politically deeply misguided, men) had lately served as competent ministers in Churchill's wartime coalition. This is what he had to say on the matter:

"No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil.

And where would the ordinary simple folk—the common people, as they like to call them in America—where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip? I stand for the sovereign freedom of the individual within the laws which freely elected Parliaments have freely passed."

Relish that rich phrase 'sovereign freedom of the individual', roll it round tyour tongue for a moment. That is a concept to which we all ought to aspire, to be in control of our own lives and to decide for ourselves how we might live. Churchill understood this to be the nature of oour people and our systems of government and law had, once upon a time, evolved to match our temperament.

His words caused understandable offence in 1945. But was what Churchill said either untrue or inaccurate?

Well, look about you. Today's Labour ministers are creatures of a very different stripe from their 1945 forebears. They positively relish controlling our lives and getting their minions to spy on us. Then ask yourself if there is any evidence that Labour sees coercion and snooping by the State as the means par excellence by which its will shall be carried into execution?

It is for you to answer that question for yourself. But might I take this chance to proffer some examples which provide actual evidence that this is so?

One piece of evidence you might ponder is the ends to which Labour routinely puts the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. The Telegraph report of today sets out the latest manifestation of the enthusiasm with which local councils take up the urging of The State to snoop upon, harass,  pry into the lives of and store information about entirely decent citizens.

Thus are our fellow citizens spied upon to see if they really live in the catchement area of the school to which they aspire, quite properly, to send their children. Our rubbish bins are to be bugged. Whatever lie they tell you now, they will surely get round to 'pay as you throw' before too long.

Council Jobsworths will be able to force their way into your home against your will to inspect it for any improvements you might have had the tmerity to make, whereupon your local council will squeeze you for some more tax. Council Tax revaluation is coming, whatever the main parties might care to tell you.

Your movements by car will be watched and their details stored on some Big Brother computer somewhere (into which, you may be sure, any government or local government Jobsworth will be able to look). Your police records will be open to inspection by police officials from Talinn to Lisbon and Copenhagen to Nicosia.

Were it not for the general incompetence of government IT bods, they would already be able to look at your medical records. Imagine the use to which that might be put: 'Tory Politician Treated for V.D. at University'.

The ID Database, if it is not strangled by the Tories, will one day want your DNA. Our present benign, if blundering, governments might have no particular interest in your DNA. But just imagine to what use if, the heavens forfend, there was one day a Nick Griffin government. How easily might such an administration ferret out our fellow citizens of whose racial origins Old Nick did not approve? Such a database would hand your DNA to them on a plate.

And if your DNA is on a database, the first to clamour for access to it will be the insurance industry. They will do their own ferreting, this time for anyone with any sort of propensity to congenital illness. Your life insurance premiums will soar.

And what business does government have recording details of all our car journeys, a facility they aspire to? It might be portrayed as a means by which to control speeding and car tax evasion, but it will, you may be quite sure, be accessed illegally by someone keen to check up, for example, on who some political opponent has been visiting. Before you know it 'Tory leader has lunch with Russian Oligarch' will be the headline.

We are well on the way to a particularly nasty society in which government and its agents, local authorities and QUANGOs, routinely spy on their fellow citizens. We are already well down that road. If you need to understand what this means in practice, just watch "The Lives of Others" , a film about how the STASI spied on its fellow citizens. And then ask yourself how far down that road we have already gone.

Labour weasels will, of course, recycle robotically the mantra 'if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about'. A fair few Lib Dems will join in and I daresay that some Tory Hanger-Floggers would doubtless harbour similar fantasies about how they will keep crime down thus.

The State, far from protecting us, represents the greatest threat to freedom since the days when it routinely burnt people for belonging to the wrong branch of Christendom. This urge to recruit people to do the spying and checking up is simply further evidence of the State's burning desire to know.

This process has been helped in the last thirteen years by Labour's assiduous assault upon the independence and political neutrality of the police. This report in The Times reminds us of how far that process has gone and how much damage it has already done to the fabric of the police as neutral arbiters of the law. We have already had the advantage of seeing Sir Ian Blair, lately Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, on television giving us the benefit of his opinions. And overtly political they were too, so that the phrase 'Labour Stooge' came readily to mind. No wonder Boris told him to clear off. But he is not the only one.

Intensely political coppers, with their degrees in sociology and criminology (whatever happened to the old fashioned art of thief-taking, I hear you ask?) stand four-square behind the STASIing of our country. It helps relieve them of responsibility for keeping order and leaves us with someone else to blame if things go wrong. And if it all goes pear-shaped, why matters have been so arranged that the picture at the head of this column might become the norm in OUR society. The next step: Police Trusties on every street to monitor your behaviour.

Meanwhile there is an election coming. If you like Labour's vision for our country, vote for them by all means. But don't complain if you find yourself, your family and your home and private life subject to invasive and secretive scrutiny.

On the other hand you could vote for a party, UKIP, which will sets its face against such un-British behaviour. Dismantling all the apparatus and impedimenta of the STASI state would be, I am sure, a thing of pleasure to your average UKIPPER. A fair number would offer to do it for free.........

John Locke

johnlockesblog@gmail.com