From control to surveillance

Like husband, like wife. Yvette Cooper has begun shadowing Theresa May where Ed Balls stopped: by lacerating Nick Clegg’s naïveté in believing that control orders should be abolished. There is a faint note of animus in her politicking too. ‘National security,’ she said, ‘should not be about keeping Nick Clegg safe in his job.’

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The government invited Cooper’s charge with its own crass political calculation. Spinning the new measures as a Liberal Democrat victory could only elicit that response from an opposition that is intent on exploiting the government’s broad weakness on law and order.

In fact, as Lord West has remarked, the government has not even come close to rescinding the substance of New Labour’s control orders. If anything the new ‘surveillance orders’ are another Liberal Democrat defeat. Lord Carlisle has insisted