How grotesque to see MPs hide behind their ancient freedoms when they've spent the past 13 years trampling on ours

The irony of the situation would be richly comic, were it not at the same time so profoundly offensive.

Three Labour MPs (and one Tory peer) have been formally charged with fiddling their expenses. So what defence are they seeking to use? The centuries-old Parliamentary Privilege law which allows them to speak freely in parliament.

It beggars belief. For in truth, no government in history has done more to undermine the ancient concepts of civil liberty and freedom of speech than Labour in its past 13 years in office.

Perhaps because so many of these infringements on our traditional rights have been linked to the fight against terrorism, the general public - currently more preoccupied with keeping their jobs and paying bills than their civil liberties - have quietly gone along with the changes.

As a result, there's a real danger we're all going to wake up one day in a country where state control is the rule and close personal surveillance the norm to such an extent that we might as well be in communist China or Eric Honecker's East Germany.

Arrest

Our emails will be read, our telephone conversations listened to and our every movement monitored by CCTV. And if we try to protest, we're likely to be bundled straight into a police cell and left there.

Do I exaggerate? I don't think so; having trained and practised as a criminal barrister before going on to writing scripts for legal dramas such as Kavanagh QC and New Street Law, I am steeped in what I learned from day one at university: that the right to silence, freedom from arbitrary arrest and the concept of innocence until proven guilty were all absolute and inviolable.

Nevertheless, two decades on I now find myself living in a country where terrorist suspects can be locked up for 28 days without any evidence, where the results of the postmortem of Dr David Kelly, the former weapons inspector, can be kept secret for 70 years and where vulnerable individuals such as Gary Mackinnon can be extradited to the United States, despite the complete absence of proper reciprocal extradition arrangements with that country.

Truth is becoming far stranger than the fiction I have spent the past ten years conjuring.

It's not quite all the Labour government's fault; the right to silence was actually eroded by the Conservative administration in 1994 which, having borne the brunt of IRA terrorist attacks for so long, passed the Criminal Justice And Public Order Act which allowed juries to infer anything they wished, including guilt, from a defendant's failure to give an account of himself.

It may sound sensible, but has there been any increase in criminal convictions? No.

Since then, however, it's been Labour doing the damage, as it certainly did with the Criminal Justice Act 2003, which gave the courts power to order a nojury trial where there was real evidence that jury tampering might take place. The first trial of this kind is now under way, ending a right to trial by jury that goes all the way back to Magna Carta.

In other words, it enshrines the right of British subjects to be the judges of their peers. Jury-less trials take it away.

The Coroners And Justice Act 2009 does similar damage to the ancient principle of coroners' inquests being held in public. The traditional understanding has been that we all have a right to know how any unnatural death occurred.

But now, if the Lord Chancellor - currently Jack Straw - so desires, a politically uncomfortable inquest can be avoided and a secret inquiry, with no jury, no publicity and no public scrutiny, held in its place.

So the next time a top government scientist is found dead in an Oxfordshire field or an innocent Brazilian is shot on the London Underground, we may never find out why.

Even freedom of speech, perhaps the most precious liberty of all, has come under attack. Once again, it's been sacrificed in the name of the fight against terror, with the creation of offences such as the 'encouragement' and ' glorification' of terrorism.

Where will it end? Such is the madness surrounding these so-called 'hate crimes' that old ladies are visited by the police for writing in objection to a Gay Pride march, while Tony Blair was investigated by the police for allegedly shouting 'f****** Welsh' at his television as he watched election results coming in.

Suspects

Faced with stories like that, it's tempting to smile and think that no damage is being done. But it is. Thanks to the Terrorist Act of 2000, innocent tourists and amateur and professional photographers alike are being treated like criminal suspects by the police - simply because they are taking photographs in what have been deemed sensitive areas.

And yet conversely, the Government has absolutely no compunction about taking photographs of us just about anywhere it likes. Its traffic cameras track our journeys by car, while CCTV cameras monitor just about every step we take on foot.

When the next generation of cameras comes in, detailed enough to allow facial recognition, Big Brother will know where we are almost from the moment we step out of the front door.

As for what we get up to indoors, the vast computer currently under construction at GCHQ, designed to intercept all our emails and telephone conversations, will take care of that. It's the equivalent of the secret police steaming open private letters.

Intolerant

Add in serious curbs on the right to protest, the prospect of biometric passports and increasing limitations on the freedom to express one's religious preferences at work, and it is difficult to see in what sense we remain a 'free' country.

Like many, I would rather live with the moderate risk of terrorism than endure the suffocating safety of an intolerant surveillance state.

Magna Carta says: 'No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or be disseised [illegally dispossessed] of his freehold, or liberties, or be outlawed, or exiled or any other wise destroyed; nor will we not pass upon him or condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. We . . . will not deny or defer to any man either justice or right.'

Now and again in history, definitive words are written which stand good for all time. Those agreed at Runnymede don't need amending, they need implementing; before Britain forgets what true freedom is.

They are words that all MPs - not only those now seeking so cynically to hide behind their own ancient legal rights - would do well to scrutinise