Beware of Mr Brown. He's after your rights

It is precisely because the Prime Minister appears so earnest and reasonable - is so solicitous, so keen to discover common ground, so conscious of our tradition of rights and freedom, and so strategic in the presentation of his case - that he represents a far greater threat to civil liberties than did his predecessor.

Gordon Brown would never say 'civil liberties arguments are made for another age', because it is too crass. Of course the arguments should be heard, their moral force acknowledged and their proponents saluted, but then gently nudged out of the way by the imperatives of security. The exceptionalism that Tony Blair pleaded is, in confronting what Brown called the 'generation-long challenge to defeat al-Qaeda related terrorist violence', still intact.

He has asked for 56 days' detention without charge and has placed ID cards, now referred to as 'ID security' - cleverly linking the cards to ideas of personal protection - at the heart of the counter-terrorist strategy. Neither measure is proven to add to our capacity to fight terror, yet both represent the gravest possible menace to the store of freedom in this country. In the name of security, the state increases its power over the individual and will be soon be in a position to apply it in areas of our life that have nothing to do with the fight against al-Qaeda. That is why a Labour government again attempts to entrench ID cards in the armoury of terror measures, even though they clearly did not stop Madrid and would not have stopped the 7/7 bombers. London Observer