The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Link: Labour turmoil over new police powers | Uk News | News | Telegraph.

All my life, I have been proud to be a "law-abiding citizen." A lawyer by training and instinct, I am more sceptical than most about the benefits of law in general. In the criminal realm, I know it works best when it’s simple, clear and generally supported. As a long-term resident of ex-Communist states, I know their oppression was more sophisticated than is generally understood. Part of their technique was to create a mass of petty obligations that always (a) justified police involvement and (b) ensured the citizen was guilty of something. I have talked to clever people who lived under such conditions. They are difficult to subvert, once established.

The British people have long been law-abiding. Our Government believes that any trash it badges as "law" will become Holy Writ to us. However much we might regret the 3,000+ new offences introduced by this most meddling and petty-minded of tyrannical governments, we know our society is in danger if we pick and choose which laws to obey. We may bemoan the devaluation of law itself, but we continue to honour the debased currency.

The stage must come, however, when we say "no more". I fear it is close for me. If I am stopped and searched under these proposed new powers when I am in England, I shall resist. I shall not initiate violence, but I shall resist any offered. What have I to lose? They are well on the way to turning our archipelago into a gulag. If all our islands are to be one great prison camp, what is there to fear from prison?" 

Things have already gone too far. If I were, for example, to recommend this course of action to you, I would probably be committing a crime.

We are told there are those in the Cabinet who have "reservations" about the thuggish thinking of Blair, Brown and Reid. Careerist cowards that they are, they will do nothing more than leak about their concerns to the press so that -one day- they can disassociate themselves. When that day comes, they will all claim to have been in the Resistance. But we shall know them for the collaborators they are.