Leading article: An attack on civil liberties that won't make us safer

Britain has witnessed sustained assaults on its liberties at various times, notably under Charles I. Then, Parliament rose memorably to the challenge. Not much chance of that nowadays, alas, as the Government prepares a fresh assault on civil rights in the form of the new "stop and question" powers it intends to grant the police.

As ever, Tony Blair is artfully presenting the proposals using tried and tested anti-elitist language: those arguing against the new powers are lambasted as the selfish and squeamish few who prize "their" freedoms above the right of 60 million law-abiding "ordinary" people to walk the streets in safety. They are the dreaded liberal snobs who care only about the rights of bombers. It's the old refrain, and one that distorts and paralyses so much public debate in this country.

What looks likely to get lost in this exchange is the fact that the police are about to gain a very significant increase in powers; the principle that citizens have to commit a crime before the police can detain them - a basic cornerstone of this country's notion of liberty - is about to be severely undermined. Once surrendered, these rights will be difficult to claw back. Moreover, the potential victims of this change may not always be the robed and bearded bombers of popular imagination.

Libertarian arguments not the only ones to be made against this change. There is a reasonable suspicion that what we are seeing here is not far-sighted statesmanship but short-termist party politics.

The two sponsors of "stop and question", Mr Blair and John Reid, are both about to leave the stage this month and in a hurry to secure their respective legacies. This offers part of the explanation for the haste with which the proposals have been introduced, with a view to their becoming law in the autumn. Their probable aim appears to be to lock Gordon Brown into following the Blairite security agenda and to embarrass the Tories by putting them on the wrong side of the same agenda.

There could also be great practical problems when it comes to putting these proposals into effect. One reason why the old "sus" laws were rightly abandoned was because they left an entire community feeling stigmatised and singled out. The result was the Brixton riots of 1981. This time it will be young Muslims rather than blacks who will be the unwanted recipients of police attention. The worry is that the outcome - the homogenisation of an entire ethnic or religious community, leading to serious disturbances - will be the same.

This government has got too used to bouncing Parliament and the country into accepting ever more stringent restrictions of civil liberties by uttering the talismanic words "security" and "terror". It feels enabled to do so by opinion polls that appear to show that the public values its safety, loosely conceived, above almost all other considerations, including liberty, no doubt because most people believe it is someone else's liberty rather than their own that is at risk.

Messrs Blair and Reid can thus relax in the certain knowledge that most people will greet whatever they do in the field of civil liberties with a degree of indifference. Whether they are advancing the struggle against terrorism with these instruments is questionable, however. The most potent weapon against Islamist terrorism in this country is the enthusiastic co-operation of the law-abiding majority of Muslims with the forces of law and order. They may well be less inclined to lend the police that co-operation if they feel that the police have been given special powers to harass their community.

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