Don't fall for the red herring

That's not the official name of the Home Secretary's draft Communications Bill, but it sums up its intrusive Big Brother nature.

There should be no need to explain this to Cameron and his crew because they berated similar proposals advanced by new Labour when the Tories and Liberal Democrats were in opposition.

They understood then that obliging internet and phone companies to store information about who was speaking to whom and to hand that over on the say-so of a politician to various government agencies would be a breach of civil liberties.

It's left now to mavericks on their own benches such as former shadow home secretary David Davis to remind them of their former position.

All governments have a tendency to pay lip service to citizens' rights while insisting that they must be infringed to ensure protection against terrorists, robbers and sundry other threats.

But the measures the conservative coalition has in mind would not target those believed to fall into these categories.

They would include the whole of society in a gigantic trawl, treating us all effectively as suspects.

Security agencies and the police service are employed to investigate threats to citizens' well-being and to identify those responsible, building up evidence that can be used in legal proceedings against suspects.

There is already ample scope for judges to authorise surveillance of the contacts made by suspects to help build up a case.

But there is a world of difference between that kind of targeted surveillance and the all-enveloping intrusion proposed by May in Parliament under cover of the Prime Minister's one-day guest appearance at Leveson.

The Home Secretary spewed forth wild stories about criminals and tax-evaders getting off scot-free unless Parliament agrees to her draconian proposals, but no-one should fall for such scaremongering.

She and the rest of the Con-Dem coalition are making it more difficult to tackle these problems, having pressed ahead with personnel reductions in the police service and HM Revenue and Customs despite warnings of the likely effects of such short-sighted cuts.

May took another leaf out of the new Labour lexicon of such unlamented authoritarians as David Blunkett and John Reid when she claimed: "The only people who have anything to fear from this are the criminals."

Criminals are not the only people who insist on protection of their privacy. Every citizen is entitled to go about their business without being treated as a potential suspect.

The Home Secretary made another tendentious claim that, unless society submits to this intrusion into their privacy, security and policing agencies would be unable to keep track with the modern technology necessary to nab villains, dubbing the amassing of communication records "the fingerprinting of the modern age."

Perhaps someone should tell her that fingerprinting is not imposed on the majority of the population because most people have done nothing to warrant it.

There are indeed politicians who favour a compulsory national fingerprint database, using similar arguments that May deploys now, including the "only the guilty should be fearful" red herring.

We should refuse to be blackmailed into surrendering to this police state rhetoric and insist on a just balance between tackling crime and defending people's privacy.