Freedom-wise, there’s nowhere more self-satisfied than Britain. Bastion of personal liberty, home of the ground-breaking Magna Carta, the place where the sturdy yeoman can sit under his thatched roof secure from the intrusions of the king…

Pull the other one. Any sentient citizen must realise that in terms of liberty, the country has less than a state-of-the-art democracy; in fact, it’s been coasting on its reputation.

Now, thanks to a slavishly Bush-poodling Labour government with a startlingly authoritarian bent, Britons are beginning to recognise that this sceptred isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden is about to become this surveillance state, this database depot, this green and pleasant centre of preventive detention, this precious home of biometrically-keyed national identification cards set in a sea of CCTV cameras.

The government’s appetite to maintain detailed files on its citizens is growing

But Britons are getting a chance to have their own democratic moment. On Saturday February 28, lawyers, judges, politicians, human rights supporters, anti-surveillance activists, members of the Countryside Alliance, rock ‘n’ rollers denied the right to stage concerts of their own choosing (honestly) and presumably more than a few ordinary concerned citizens will be gathering all across the UK - in London of course, but also in Belfast, Bristol, Cardiff, Cambridge, Glasgow and Manchester - at the Convention on Modern Liberty.

There they will hear from a roster of speakers that will include Shami Chakrabarti, Henry Porter, Helena Kennedy and David Davis. And they will learn more about the ever encroaching threats to individual liberty that have been fuelled by government’s growing appetite to keep its citizens under constant watch and maintain detailed files on what they do. It may not be as dramatic as the storming of the Bastille, but it’s a start.

And a start that might learn from the USA. A new, more American-like legal recognition of individual rights would be a welcome update for what is still, just, one of the world’s leading democracies. Not that it could prevent all transgressions, as the Bush-Cheney administration amply demonstrated. But such a