Bravo to the greys standing up to the state

Earlier this week he thrashed the Government for stripping away our rights and liberties, extracted after monumental struggles over centuries: "I'm angry that there is so little anger around me at what is being done to our society, supposedly to protect it."

Respect! As they age, most folk leave rage behind. They think wisdom means accommodation. Many become conservative and pro-Establishment. Not so this novelist. I bring him some comfort.

True, millions of Britons have been panicked by the (at times deliberately inflated) dangers of terrorism, and so readily consent to the savage curtailment of civil rights. They unthinkingly support detention of terrorist suspects without charge for 42 days, increased state surveillance, neighbourhood spying — measures previously thought totalitarian. Honourable people argue that torture can be used to extract information, or that it is OK to bang up people for months without telling them why. Spin and propaganda have led them to acquiescence.

Only an idiot would deny that there are terrorists and their supporters in our midst. The malevolent plotters plan to wreak mayhem and destabilise this democracy. These are hard times. During hard times the state becomes overpowerful, bends citizens to its will, rejects checks and balances and compromises principles. Individual freedom and the rule of law become vulnerable and
call to be protected. And a surge of opposition is building up across the land, from Left to Right.

At the Labour Party conference in Manchester this week, I spoke at a debate on excessive state power, organised by the campaign group Liberty. Fergus Shanahan, Sun deputy editor, and Tory sympathisers made common cause with us Lefties to condemn the irreversible encroachment by the Government into our lives. Most were of an age: we were fired-up, grey-haired comrades. Later, a loyal Labour Party woman in her seventies said to me: "I'm so furious, I feel I should chain myself to a railing near conference."

She'd better not: swarms of armed policemen are edgy at the barriers and who knows what they could do to the dear old thing. It falls upon fierce oldies to hold back the authoritarian state: long may they live.