Former head of MI5, Dame Stella Rimington, has made an outspoken attack on the government’s erosion of civil liberties and warned that a culture of fear could lead to a police state.

As the UK’s former chief spook Rimington is hardly one of the “usual suspects” when it comes to civil liberties. Yet she has consistently opposed Labour plans such as compulsory ID Cards and 42 internment without charge. The latest comments come in a an interview with Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia where she says:

It would be better that the Government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism: that we live in fear and under a police state

That sounds to me like she’s saying that the government are doing the terrorists’ work for them, a position with which I completely agree.

Conservative MP David Davies, who recently fought a by-election on a civil liberties platform, said:

Like so many of those who have had involvement in the battle against terrorism, Stella Rimington cares deeply about our historic rights and rightly raises the alarm about a Government whose first interest appears to be to use the threat of terrorism to frighten people and undermine those rights rather than defend them

Isabella Sankey, director of policy at Liberty, said:

Over the last seven years, we’ve seen a number of measures passed, some of which affect very few of us in a horrible and terrible way, whether that’s house arrest under control orders or rendition and torture in foreign states.
We’ve also seen many, many measures that affect all of us just a little bit and, most of all, which seriously impact our rights to privacy.

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