Nick Clegg's announcement today

Alan Johnson is a nice guy in some ways, he's like your friend's dad from school, you know the dad of that kid who could play football really well, but obviously he's just way way wrong.

In fact former Home Secretary Johnson's response to Nick Clegg's absolutely correct announcement today, much of which this little blog has campaigned for in the past, just goes to show how dangerously out of touch Johnson and Labour have been on this issue.

And this is what we have been saying here in the past.

Johnson actually calls the decisions to reign in Labour's police state as "rampant hyperbole" and suggests that Clegg has 'joined up different issues' re CCTV, ID Cards, DNA database, Contact Point child database etc.

But the problem is, as we've long talked about here in the past, is that these aren't different disperate issues, they are all part of an all too visible rock-solid trend, where one part of the trend, dangerously appears to reinforce the necessity for another, and that overall dehumanizes and degrades.

And if Johnson can't actually see that, it really does make you wonder about the rest of his judgment and what he was doing in office all that time.

By the way, I think this coalition with the Lib Dems, is all quite healthy and I think in principle a good outcome for voters has come out of the general election here. I really have no complaints about it at this time.

And it's absolutely right that Clegg and the Tories start to dismantle this pile of terrifying nonsense that Labour has willfully and dangerously created and put it where it belongs: in the dustbin of history.