What a bloody liberty!

It's akin to Ken Livingstone embracing capitalism; Jamie Oliver Oliver endorsing Turkey Twizzlers; or any member of the Christian Right in America throwing in his lot with Obama.
Today the greatest enemy of personal liberty and freedom this country has had to endure since Oilver Cromwell has had the brazen, long-necked cheek to write a hymn to Britishness.
Gordon ( I'm in charge) Brown - for it is he - has once again set out to prove either that he is a charlatan; or that he is completely bonkers; or, possibly, a large dollop of both. Writing in today's Daily Mail, the man who has either directly encouraged or, at the very least, has failed to prevent, the enactment of the most restrictive Laws in recent British history has had the nerve to list the love of personal liberty as one of the defining British traits.
This, let us remind ourselves, is a man who has been at the very heart of the Labour administration for 13 years; the man, let us not forget, who was desperate for us to appreciate just how much power and influence he wielded when he was Chancellor. Nothing, apparently, got done or even considered until Gordon Brown had evaluated it, approved it and, most importantly since he held the purse strings in his great clunking fist, agreed to stump up the readies to fund it.
Thus, we can be sure that he endorsed, and still endorses, legislation that will require every freedom loving British citizen to carry an ID Card; that forces the same sons and daughters of liberty to present a passport or other photo I.D even when travelling internally by plane in the UK, that threatens them with arrest or the confiscation of their camera if they take photographs that the police might object to ( such as coppers battering demonstrators or shooting innocent Brazilian electricians) ; that treats mildly eccentric trainspotters as potential terrorists; that instructs the police to arrest innocent Christians for expressing sincerely-held, but negative, opinions about homosexuality; that removes their right (or liberty) to express beliefs, however soberly held, about other faith or belief systems; that seeks to convince us that the only way for the government to protect our hard-won liberties is to allow them at both national and local level to spy on our e-mails, on-line searches and other electronic communications; that uses Parliamentary democracy to turn one significant group of people in our society - smokers -into pariahs and sub-humans who are not allowed to enjoy the same social interaction as the rest of us in pubs, bars and restaurants.
All of these things are Gordon's legacy to us; the sum of 13 years of his management of the country. He has helped to create a police state whose intrusion and control of people's lives goes way beyond anything that George Orwell ever envisaged in 1984. With the willing assistance of the brain-dead ( Jacqui Smith), the infantile ( Harman, Milliband, Balls) and the manipulative in the shape of Mandelson, Blair and Campbell, he has attacked and all but destroyed the very British characteristics - tolerance, fair play, justice and Liberty- that he claims are so central to his being in today's Daily Mail.
And, with the hugely divisive and class-based equality legislation that Lady Longford ( AKA Harriet Harman) is introducing, the last bastions of personal liberty - including the freedom to choose work mates, business colleagues, councillors and other officials soley on their qualifications and ability to do a particular job - will be consigned to the dustbin along with freedom of speech and expression.
Brown promised an end to boom and bust. What we ended up with is the biggest bust in British hsitory. Brown, typically, says none of it is his fault. It's a global problem.
Now, he wants the British people to buy into his new-found sense of Britishness, while doing everything in his power to destroy it. When people finally wake up to what is happening; when it becomes clear that the people principally affected by anti-terorist legislation are not foreign insurgents but their own friends, family and neighbours, Brown will place the blame on everything - and everyone- but himself.
He has already seeded the ground in his Mail article, referring to " security threats that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago."
Let's see. Fifty years takes us back to 1959. True the UK didn't face the threat of Moslem terrorism that it does now. But, that's not to say that there were no threats. In no particular order, I can think of Greek Cypriot EOKA terrorists, the Mau Mau in Kenya; insurgents in Malaysia and Aden. Later, from 1969 onwards, we saw the rise of the IRA, the Provisional IRA and other splinter groups all of whom regularly inflicted , or tried to inflict, terror on the British people. I am old enough to remember the bomb attacks on the Horse Guards, the Old Bailey, the Tory's Brighton hotel and the Guildford squaddies' pub; all of which were carried out by men who looked, talked and, more or less, shared the same cultural background as the bulk of the population. In that sense, they represented a much more difficult threat to counter than that posed by Moslem extremists who come from a large, but clearly dentifiable minority, of the population.
None of the measures introduced to curb the IRA campaigns - which I objected to along with many other people - were so loosely drafted as to enable local councils and other organisations to use them against innocent members of the general public. Now, we are cursed with an administration that is apparently incapable of drafting legislation of equivalent unambivalence. Instead, modern terrorism laws are so open to mis-interpretation that they have been used to spy on parents accused of placing their kids in the wrong schools, and to eject an octogenarian acivist - who had the temerity to embarass Jack Straw - from the Labour Conference.
Some might say this bad draftsmanship is inadvertent or simple incompetence. I beg to differ. This is an administration stuffed to the gills with lawyers. If the legislation allows them and their appointees to harass, observe and control the population at large then I believe it to be by design, not accident.
Whatever Gordon might write, now or in the future, about his love of liberty, all the evidence points in the opposite direction. He is an enemy of freedom and personal liberty and a real threat to democracy in this country.