This stop-and-search threatens us all

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They are brown- and black-skinned Londoners with attitude, ambitious professionals, born and made in Britain. Some have been bothered too many times and they are getting angry.

After the aborted bomb plot on Haymarket in 2007, the police were given extraordinary powers.

Incredibly, law officers are now allowed wilfully to obstruct citizens and rummage around their bodies and possessions, even if they have no cause to suspect them of any sinister motive or crime. Such clout can turn the sweetest bobby into a petty tyrant. It patently has.

Numbers of stop and searches last year soared by 322 per cent for black people and 277 per cent for Asians over the previous year - against an increase of 185 per cent for whites. Of the 8,000, eight were arrested; fewer still will stand trial.

After the suicide bomb attacks in London I felt we all had to accept that there would be more overt and annoying policing, and that it would be based on racial profiling, seeing as the plotters weren't blue-eyed natives of Henley.

In the Eighties when similar sus laws were used in Brixton and Notting Hill to control and humiliate black men, I used to go out on demos and write angry pieces about the injustices. In recent years I grew compliant.

Now I question my own gullibility. Perhaps I too hastily adjusted to the new demands because of the shock of those explosions in my beloved city.

This pre-emptive policing is provocative and stupid. It has not helped break into networks of terrorists.

The Home Office under the hapless Ms Smith makes hyperbolic claims for the strategy which its own arrest-and-charge figures deflate.

But what if super-stop and search was never meant to be a vital "tool" to prevent terrorists and criminals? That it was instead a plot to make us prickly and ready to panic?

Upping the level of natural trepidation helps governments and law enforcers to impose excessive controls.

Be afraid, be very afraid. That kind of power grab is a greater threat to our democracy than the young Londoners subjected to stop and search.