[Alex]
Say what you will about George W Bush but his approach to civil liberties has been no worse – or, at least, little worse – than Tony Blair’s. Typically, the Labour administration in Edinburgh wants to bring Scots law into line with English practice (for reasons of control-freakery only), and start storing DNA samples taken from innocent Scots.
As Gerald Warner, perhaps the most dyspeptic conservative in Scottish journalism (a sellers’ market, to be sure), notes in today’s Scotland on Sunday:
At present, police databases in England hold the DNA profiles of 1.14 million innocent people – a practice forbidden under Scots law. At present, we can congratulate ourselves on living under a legal system more respectful of civil liberty than in England. The Scottish Parliament should be fighting to maintain that situation.
Instead, perversely, Labour proposes to use its control of Holyrood to demolish the defences of Scottish personal liberties and harmonise our laws with those of England, as in pre-devolution times. South of the Border, the DNA of 3.46 million people is stored in police records, the highest number in the world – more than in Putin’s Russia. That is an embryonic police state.
[Hat tip: David Farrer at the splendidly named blog Freedom and Whisky]
The Dish 