I'd like to attach a health warning to last night's Dispatches. Peter Hitchins, like other right wing journalists who regularly pitch up on question time, adopts a simple tactic; champion a popular and worthy concern and load it up with right wing garbage.

Hitchens told us, for instance, that British police had, until now, been different from those of other countries. Having been on the picket line at Wapping in 1986 and been punched in the face and been dragged to the ground and kicked all the way to the van on a student demo in 1987 I beg to differ. From the miners strike of 1984, the Grunwicks dispute of 1977, the General Strike of 1926, and back to the Peterloo Massacre the British Police have done the government's bidding with whatever violence they deemed necessary.

Hitchens told us, with a benign nod to the Victorian ideal, that the Justice system no longer punishes criminals but blames society for their crimes. Probably the most blatantly dishonest right wing fantasy of them all, we lock more people up, per head of population, than any other European country with the exception of Turkey. The Victorians, of course, locked up and executed children for petty theft.

Hitchens also had the arrogance to suggest that only we British, unlike our European neighbours,valued and cherished freedom. The man is a right wing loon with no integrity; he belongs in the Labour cabinet which he so despises.

Having stripped away all the nonsense, there does remain a substantial point of course and one that has exercised many of us writing these blogs - the undoubted, persistent and frightening removal of our freedoms. I find it particularly loathsome, but not surprising, that this is being done by a Labour government but anyone who thinks Cameron would repeal a single line of legislation would be disappointed. The technology and expertise gradually being brought to bear in Britain was developed in the north of Ireland, at the request of the Tory Government of Margaret Thatcher, where the population has been spied upon for the last 25 years. Hitchens never spoke out against their freedoms being curtailed.

To take just one example, the experience of the young man accused of stealing mail. The local plod, not known for their recruitment of the sharpest tools in the box, decided that he must be guilty because they had a positive forensic result. Actually this crass and shoddy use of evidence isn't new. The Birmingham Six, after being beaten to a pulp by those kindly British Police of yesteryear, were convicted in exactly the same way. The police were told that they had traces of Nitro-Glycerine on their hands. This alone was used to convict them. That was over thirty years ago. The danger of introducing more technology is that it allows the Police to make their mistakes more easily and more often.

Richard Dawkins has written that people shouldn't worry about a DNA database because its no different from using an identity parade. I respect Dawkin's determination to protect objectivity and therefore to reject religion but he also rejects politics. To a scientist, DNA testing presents no problem. But most of the public and nearly all of the Police are not scientists. We know, intuitively, that an identity parade may or may not produce the truth - we all fail to recognise people sometimes. But presented with a scientific result, with a number, many people would tend to assume it had a greater weight. In fact DNA testing is quite a limited tool. It does tell you that a person was almost certainly present but it says nothing about when and it can't tell that someone wasn't there. It should only ever be used to corroborate over evidence. The police made a crude DNA test positive equals guilty assumption with the young man accused of stealing mail; in fact he was identified because he had posted some letters in the postbox. The Birmingham Six had been playing cards, coated with plastic containing Nitro-Glycerine.

We cannot stop technology being introduced. What will make the difference between having a country where a train spotter is assumed to be a terrorist or not will be the nature of the Police and security services. Remember these are people who can't even locate an 8 metre long, 3 metre high bright white lorry. If people continue to swallow the lie that there is a Muslim plot to overthrow our way of life and so accept the need for more and more security we will end up like those awful eastern European countries that the media used to tell us about. You know, where they had house arrest, detention without trial and the police spying on everybody...ah.

The alternative is to stop bombing people, find out why so many young people are attracted to terrorism and help them using our vast wealth and technology. But Hitchens would hate that; its not very Victorian.