Individual freedom is a cherished right which is to be protected

GOVERNMENT, naturally, has a responsibility to look after the weak and vulnerable, and protect us all from threats to our security.

But it has other obligations too: obligations to uphold the common good and to protect our values and traditions.

In an effort to show they were doing something, previous Governments tried legislating their way through security problems. They may have thought they were acting responsibly, when in fact they neglected their obligations to us.

Individual choice and responsibility were undermined by an unwieldy web of rules and regulations. Civil liberties got buried beneath a guise of national security.

We now live in a country where half a million people come under some kind of official surveillance and where emergency terror laws have become part of the normal policing arsenal.

That our progressive liberal democracy has become progressively illiberal in recent years is to me a great and disturbing contradiction.

We've all seen and felt it but now, thankfully, the new coalition is acting on it. It will be doing so by rolling back state power rather than expanding it.

The Government got off to a good start by unveiling its vision for our big society – one such antidote to Labour's 'Big Brother'.

The Home Secretary's announcement last week that there will be a rapid review of security powers confirms that its big ideas are not the stuff of token politics: individual freedom is a cherished right, which needs to be protected.

Focusing on six priority areas, the review is set to examine those aspects of security legislation which have chipped away at out liberties with little return: the use of control orders, the detention of terrorist suspects and importantly to my mind – Section 44 of the Terrorism Act which enables police to stop and search anyone in a specific area.

I know that many of us have long had concerns about Section 44 – which removed the need to demonstrate reasonable grounds for suspicion and with that, a valuable safeguard of liberty.

It meant that stop and search could be carried out on people presenting minor challenges, such as protesters, as opposed to people suspected of serious criminal or terrorist activity.

For years I've warned that unbridled stop and search powers would lead to misuse. I argued that such powers should only be used when there is evidence of a specific terrorist threat, not as an extension of day-to-day policing.

So I had no hesitation in welcoming the Home Secretary's statement in the House of Commons. Some people might say that the end justifies the means, that reduced freedom is a fitting trade-off for a safer environment.

If Section 44 had proved effective in combating terrorism, then perhaps there is a debate to be had. But we've known for some time that it has not. Ministry of Justice statistics showed that in 2008 there was a threefold increase in the use of the power, but fewer than 0.1 per cent of those stopped were arrested for terrorism offences – let alone charged or convicted.

It strikes me that, if there is a price worth paying, Section 44 is not it.

The threat of terrorism is alive and real. The Government's first duty is to protect its citizens. But liberty is our great inheritance.

It's the oxygen of our democracy – without it, our society is in trouble. It's also a powerful weapon in our war against terror: protecting lives is about protecting our way of life.

For these reasons, the Government can only truly meet its obligations to us by ensuring, as much as possible, that security and civil liberty go hand in hand.