Smith's Stasi are a menace to freedom

Daily Mail 26th August 2008

Home Secretary: Jacqui Smith

Lovers of liberty will instinctively recoil from the Government's drive to arm private security guards, council officials and car park attendants with sweeping police powers over ordinary citizens.

Why should free-born Britons be obliged to give their names and addresses to this rag-tag army of snoopers and busybodies, with their licence to impose fixed penalty notices, stop cars and seize alcohol?

No wonder members of the Community Safety Accreditation Scheme - with their badges mostly bought for under £100 - have already been dubbed Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's 'Stasi', after the dreaded East German secret police.

In a disturbing document, the Home Office makes clear it is deliberately using CSAS members to do jobs deemed too petty-minded for properly trained police. Could anything be better guaranteed to breed ill-feeling against the new force?

As Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve says: 'The public want to see real police on the streets discharging these responsibilities, not private firms who may use them inappropriately - including unnecessarily snooping on the lives of ordinary citizens.'

But then it often seems this controlfreak Government, with its batteries of databases and CCTV cameras, won't rest until it has set the entire population spying on each other and feeding information to Whitehall (which civil servants promptly lose).

True, petty offenders - from litter-louts to cyclists who ride on the pavement - are a menace. But by setting neighbour against neighbour, Smith's Stasi are more menacing still.