Why David Davis is a hero

Normally, Tory Home Secretaries, even shadow ones, are not known for their defence of civil liberties, nor are they thought to harbour a great love of human rights. As such David Davis, who resigned yesterday in sheer revulsion at Parliament's vote in favour of 42-day detention without charge, is an unlikely hero. But a hero he undoubtedly is. In a passionate and principled speech he outlined the reasons why he was incensed by the "insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms".

Davis was equally angered by the amoral manner in which the government had bought the vote. For him, New Labour's 30 pieces of silver ensured that Parliament betrayed that most fundamental tenet of genuine liberty, freedom from arbitrary power.

It is time Britons realised they have sleep- walked into the most illiberal surveillance state in the western world. We imprison more people than anyone else in western Europe; we have created the largest DNA database in the world with more than 1m innocent people on it, including 100,000 blameless children.

There is one CCTV camera for every 14 citizens, and New Labour is proposing a widely expensive and invasive identity card scheme for every citizen and purported resident. Nearly 800 government departments and public bodies can intercept our mail, tap our phones and look at our e-mails. And more than 1,000 separate requests are made to do this every day.

And lest we think that such measures are only deployed against terrorists or citizens of Pakistani descent, we need only recall Poole Borough Council using anti-terrorist legislation (the notorious Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act of 2000) to employ private detectives to watch the family of a three-year-old who they (wrongly) suspected of not living in the catchment area for the local infant school.

Under this most 'progressive' of governments, genuine protest has been virtually banned and religious hatred laws have stifled authentic debate between faiths and instituted 'thought crime' as a new criminal offence. Indeed, just last week the police arrested Christian missionaries for walking into a Muslim area.

We have strayed so far from our proper constitutional traditions that it is worth pausing to reflect on what we have lost. Magna Carta, that great foundation of modern English liberty, was signed under protest by King John in Runnymede 793 years ago this Sunday - on June 15, 1215. Its fundamental legacy was to constrain the exercise of arbitrary power and prevent unjust imprisonment without charge. Habeas corpus is the beginning of the great English tradition of limiting absolute power and progressively ensuring the liberty and protection of all under the law.

As a result, Britain was the society that Voltaire eulogised in the 18th century as a shining example of liberty, an exemplar that the rest of the world should follow. And Britain in the centuries that followed built such an aversion to absolute power and despotic rule that it produced the only European culture capable of defeating fascism and repudiating communism. Furthermore, this is the nation that created in books like 1984 and Brave New World a prescient and righteous disgust for the modern trend to totalitarianism.

So in this post-democratic age, when the Labour Party's craven acolytes emerge to denounce Davis's decision as opportunistic, one can only wonder at how the party of Keir Hardie, Attlee and Bevan has fallen so low. No doubt because they lack any principles, government supporters and media commentators cannot conceive the possibility that such a morality might exist in others.

I watched the whole debate on the BBC: the erudite and passionate defence of freedom and liberty articulated by Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Diane Abbott was truly moving. Davis has sacrificed his political career for the sake of Magna Carta, a tradition we sorely need to recover in the face of elected despotism and a dangerous and invasive state. ·