Leading article: The threats to our liberty just keep on coming

The defence of liberty against this government is less like a single battle, and more akin to a prolonged campaign against a determined insurgency. This was shaping up to be a heartening week for those concerned about civil liberties. On Monday night, the Government's bill to extend pre-charge detention for terror suspects to 42 days was thrown out by the House of Lords. Instead of pledging to send the Counter-Terrorism Bill directly back to the upper chamber, the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said she would park the measures indefinitely.

Yesterday there came another reversal. The same bill would also have allowed ministers to order inquests to be held in private "for reasons of national security". This would have banished juries, relatives and the public from certain hearings. Now this clause too is being dropped.

There is much to be glad about in these climbdowns. Allowing the police to detain terror suspects for 42 days without charge would have further eroded habeas corpus, which has been the bedrock of our liberties for centuries. Similarly, permitting ministers to banish juries and observers from courtrooms would have undermined the principle that the courts should be open to public scrutiny.

Yet we should be in no doubt. The Government has not made these concessions because it has experienced a miraculous conversion. It has dropped the provisions because it is not in a position to force them on to the statute book at the moment. And all the signs are that ministers still fail to comprehend the traditions of liberty and privacy which underpin our national life.

The Home Secretary is expected to make a speech today preparing the ground for a new bill which will go still further into areas into which no government has any business delving. The forthcoming Communications Data Bill threatens to create a "super-database" which will store a host of information relating to the British population, ranging from our phone records, to emails sent, to the websites we have accessed.

There are so many glaring objections to this idea that it is difficult to know where to begin. As good a place as any, in light of the stream of official data security breaches seen in the past year, is basic competence. What confidence can we have that officials will be able protect this vast store of sensitive data from criminal infiltration?

We might also ask why we need this new legislation, which is justified as a necessary counter-terrorism measure, when the present system seems to be working perfectly well. Police officers can already request information on suspects' phone calls and emails from network providers. And they generally get it. Why does the Government need to store all this information itself? The suspicion has to be that the answer is so that the police, or the intelligence services, can go on "fishing expeditions", looking for suspicious patterns in our communications records.

The bitter irony is that we have seen from history that when a state collects vast amounts of information on its citizens, it can actually make it harder for officials to keep an eye on the real threats to its survival. This, of course, is no consolation for the general public. Ineffectively authoritarian regimes are no less dangerous.

But perhaps the most fundamental objection to this bill is more basic still. Like the fast-expanding DNA database, like the national ID card scheme, it threatens to treat us as a nation of suspects, rather than citizens. It must be resisted by all those who value our liberties.

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