Rights of habeas corpus, of free speech and assembly, and dissent and tolerance, are slipping away, undefended.
The British are distinguished as one of the most spied upon people in the world.
A grey surveillance van with satellite tracking sits outside my local Sainsbury's.
On the pop radio station Kiss 100, the security service MI5 advertises for ordinary people to spy on each other.
These are normal now, along with the tracking of our intimate lives and a system of secretive justice that imposes 18-hour curfews on people who have not been charged with any crime and are denied the "evidence".

Meanwhile, the cause of any real civil threat to Britons has been identified and confirmed repeatedly by the intelligence services. It is "our" continuing military presence in other people's countries and collusion with a Washington cabal described by the late Norman Mailer as "pre-fascist".

In 1977, at the height of the cold war, I interviewed the Charter 77 dissidents in Czechoslovakia.
They warned that complacency and silence could destroy liberty and democracy as effectively as tanks. "We're actually better off than you in the west," said a writer, measuring his irony. "Unlike you, we have no illusions."

It is time to support those of courage who defy rotten laws to read out in Parliament Square the names of the current, mounting, war dead, and those who identify their government's complicity in "rendition" and its torture, and those who have followed the paper and blood trail of Britain's piratical arms companies. It is time to support the NHS workers who up and down the country are trying to alert us to the destruction of a Labour government's greatest achievement.