The fascists are coming!

...Or are they already here?

Deep thoughts. Cheap rhetorical questions. It's all good.

Alas, it's time for a broadly law-based rant. But, for once, it's important.

The Government plan on inventing a new order, called a VOO. The name sounds cute and harmless. But the order itself is, I would suggest, the most serious threat to our civil liberties that the Home Office has ever come up with. You have to admire John Reid - he's making his predecessors, Charles Clarke and David Blunkett, look like Ghandi.

"But surely you exaggerate!", I hear you cry. Surprisingly, and unusually, I do not. Here's an extract from the Home Office paper describing what these orders are all about:

"It would mean that, where an individual was known to be dangerous but had not committed a specific qualifying offence, restrictions could still be placed on their behaviour."

You could be a subject of a VOO if you have never committed a criminal offence. All it takes is for the police to decide that you're a troublemaker, and that's it - they can impose all sorts of restrictions such as banning you from a certain place, banning you from associating with certain people, forcing you to live in a hostel, and so on. Even though you have done absolutely nothing wrong.

And what kind of factors does the Home Office envisage might lead to a VOO being made?

"A person’s formative years and upbringing, cognitive deficiencies, a history of substance abuse, a person’s domestic situation or relationship with their partner or family, or possession of paraphernalia related to violent offending (eg, balaclava, baseball bat), or extremist material."

Marvellous. Applying these factors, this means that you could be labelled a potential violent offender, and therefore have your life controlled by the whims of the police, if:

• You grew up on a council estate;
• You enjoy playing rounders;
• You smoked drugs at some time in your life (David Cameron's in for it);
• You are divorced;
  
• You go skiing in winter;
• You are dyslexic.

Conceptually, this really isn't very far from genetically profiling people at birth, identifying who is, statistically, most likely to offend, and then locking them up before they can grow up into violent criminals. Both approaches involve punishing someone not for something they have done, but for something that they might do in the future.

The Daily Mail is going to love it.