In a week when the US Supreme Court forced the Bush administration to respect the Geneva Convention at Guantanamo and the High Court quashed control orders on six terrorist suspects, it may seem eccentric to dwell on this incident. Yet the behaviour of the police does seem to threaten the basic liberty of people to read what they want and to carry it with them where they like.

Obviously the police were groping around to support a charge against Mr Jago because, under these new laws, it is never very clear whether someone is demonstrating illegally or not. We shall see whether carrying a quotation by Orwell in a designated area (such an Orwellian phrase) is breaking the law. Would it make any difference if it was an extract from Gordon Brown's excellent speeches about endogenous growth or Tony Blair on education. Will Wordsworth do? Shakespeare?

Why did a march on Thursday by 100 businessmen protesting (rightly) against the new extradition treaty with the US, which went from Pall Mall to the Home Office and thus breached Socpa 's zone, attract little police attention, even though they had not acquired the permission of the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police? What is it that makes the offence: the words on the banner, the smile on your face, the content of your bag, the magazine you read, the absence of a tailored suit?

This is a bad law and it should be repealed. But let me note that there are grounds for slight optimism on both sides of the Atlantic in the area of rights. It is a victory for reason and due process that the Supreme Court came down against Bush on Guantanamo, where the President, as commander in chief, claimed the right to hold nearly 500 terrorist suspects.

And, here, Mr Justice Sullivan's ruling in the High Court that restrictions placed on six suspect terrorists were a breach of Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits detention without trial, does assert the rule of law. There will be an appeal heard this week, but it is difficult to see how the government's lawyers can argue that the conditions the men are held in amount to anything but detention without trial.

There are very complex issues surrounding the protection of the public against terrorists. The government does have a responsibility but that is not met by simply ignoring the law or introducing laws that remove rights such as carrying a placard. David Cameron got it right in a good speech last week when he said: 'We have seen much legislation that is at the same time authoritarian and ineffective - legislation that fails to protect our security but which, in the process, undermines our civil liberties.' That's the point: so many of the government's laws are simply futile.

He went on to mention Conservative opposition to the government's attempt to criminalise religious hatred, to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), trial without a jury and the 'draconian powers' proposed in the Civil Contingencies Act. At last the opposition is attacking the terrifying and generally unnoticed record of the last nine years.

Even last week, the government was seeking to add to Ripa, the act that allows official snooping of emails and the internet. Astonishingly, this measure will extend these unscrutinised centralised powers to the Driving Standards Agency, and yet only Simon Carr of the Independent was there to cover the story, which Conservative MP Richard Shepherd said afterwards represented another example of the drift into a 'controlled, police state'.

Mr Cameron's speech was more than just a critique because he successfully negotiated a path between utterly disparaging the Human Rights Act and the need for entrenched liberties and rights, an important balance to strike, given Tony Blair's and John Reid's skill at portraying anyone who stands up for freedom as a reckless liberal.

His proposal that there should be a homegrown bill of rights that would embed liberties in the British constitution, liberties that could not be repealed or modified by parliament, is historic and brave, for it challenges the supremacy of parliament, a cornerstone of our unwritten constitution. One or two Conservative grandees are fussing about a conflict that exists if, on the one hand, a Tory government abolished the Human Rights Act and stayed in the European Convention on Human Rights while, on the other, formulating our own bill of rights.

Mr Cameron will need to work out a formula that satisfies everyone. He suggests that one answer may lie in a codified constitutional document on the lines of the Basic Law in Germany, which sits comfortably alongside European law at the same time as allowing Germans a domestic guarantee of their rights.

But let's remember why we are discussing this. The major thrust of Labour's attack against liberty has taken place since the Human Rights Act became law. It has done little to protect us from the laws that infringe our rights to privacy, communication without random eavesdropping, assembly, protest, free speech, habeus corpus, punishment without a court deciding the law has been broken and the general growth of arbitrary powers, included in the Civil Contingencies Act.

Equally, we have not been able to rely on the gentleman's agreement of the unwritten constitution that parliament would not attack our basic rights. The bald fact is that parliament can no longer protect itself from a power-mad executive and nor can it protect us. And that is why David Cameron's proposal for a panel of jurists to begin drawing up a document for public discussion should be welcomed by democrats of all parties.

Legislation 'exaggerated'

Asked about his style of leadership he said: "You are either accused of being dictatorial or you're accused of being weak ... and occasionally both at the same time."


I am in profound disagreement with people who say it's systems management in the Home Office alone that's going to solve this
Tony Blair

Key points: Blair grilled

Senior Liberal Democrat MP Alan Beith accused him of "exaggerating the value of legislation", while under-estimating the problems facing government.

Mr Blair has come under fire over the amount of legislation, over 50 government bills, that have come out of the Home Office during his nine years in power.

But Mr Blair said new legislation was needed to improve the criminal justice system.

"I am in profound disagreement with people who say it's systems management in the Home Office alone that's going to solve this," he said.

"It's not that legislation is the whole of the answer, but I really do disagree with people who say it's not a significant part of it."

Mr Blair is also likely to be pressed about migration and population policies and provide an update on Iraq and Afghanistan

The two-and-a-half hour session began at 0900 BST.

Mr Blair said the police and security services had foiled plots since last year's attacks on London's transport network, and were aware of groups planning similar attacks.

On Friday, Britain will hold commemorative ceremonies one year on from the bombings that killed 52 people and injured 700 when four young British Muslims blew themselves up on underground trains and a bus.



"I think the most important thing is that the security services and the police have carried out their tasks ... in an exemplary way and have actually protected us against further attacks," Mr Blair said.

"There's no doubt there are people, there are groups, we believe that are engaged in planning this type of activity," he said when asked if he believed there were more British people planning attacks on the country.

Mr Blair again rejected calls for a public inquiry into the London bombings, saying police needed to focus their resources on the current threat.

Britain's police and security services have faced criticism since the July 7 attacks. Police shot and killed an innocent man last year after they wrongly suspected he was a suicide bomber.

Another man was shot and wounded in an anti-terrorism raid on a house in London last month. No evidence of criminal activity was found in the house and police have said the raid was a mistake.

Mr Blair said he was trying to engage with Britain's Muslim community but Islamic extremism could not be defeated by the government alone.

He came under fire for failing to improve relations as a poll showed 13 per cent of Britain's 1.6 million Muslims thought the four suicide bombers should be regarded as "martyrs".

The Prime Minister said moderate Muslim leaders had to do more to change attitudes.

"Government itself cannot go and root out the extremism in these communities," he told the parliamentary committee.

"I am not the person to go into the Muslim community and explain to them that this extreme view is not the true face of Islam."

Sadiq Khan, a British-born Muslim, said some Muslims, already "some of the most disillusioned and ... disenfranchised members of our community" - would feel yet more alienated.

Mr Khan described the poll's findings as "alarming and distressing".

"It only takes one person to have those views lead to devastation," he told BBC radio.

He said one planned attack foiled by authorities, which came into the public domain last week, involved individuals handling "a big sack of agricultural chemicals" which were identical to bombs used by the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

"Al Qaeda is a lot more imaginative than simply to try to bomb on anniversaries. They chose very soft targets, they chose them very judiciously, they try to make them as public and as massive as possible," Howells told a media briefing in the Cypriot capital Nicosia.

Howells, whose remit covers counter-terrorism and the Middle East, was on the east Mediterranean island to address an international conference designed to foster inter-faith dialogue which started on Monday evening.

"We need to be able to exchange ideas and start to address some of what looked like almost insoluble contradictions about discussions between religions," Howells said.

"...And that is not easy really when there are some exponents of some religions that believe that its their job to kill all infidels."

As the British government report made clear, there is no single type of militant personality. Some recruits have been poor, but some affluent; some ill-educated but others from prestigious schools; some with criminal records but others "clean"; some single but others with partners and children.

"All the cliches that we have about the poor, the radical upbringing at home, they're just blown out of the window. There is no ultimate type of characteristic, there is no cliched person who would become a terrorist," said Sebestyen Gorka, professor of terrorism studies at the George C. Marshall Center in Germany.

GROUP DYNAMIC

According to Gorka, it makes more sense for security services to focus on certain types of group behavior than to look for individual characteristics of potential terrorists.

"Usually you see people who are friends together, who are colleagues together or who are related, people who know each other first before they become extremists and who join the terrorist organizations as a group," he said.

"If you find a group of people together who really do hang out together, who eat together, who go to the same cleric for example, that is a unit that is easier to pick up in terms of surveillance ... It's easier to pick up a large blip that is suspect than one individual who is suspect."

For Waldmann, a key stage in radicalization is the point at which the militant travels abroad and creates both physical and symbolic distance from home.