It maybe bleedingly obvious, but too often in this country we're blind to the bleedingly obvious. We're in danger of becoming a police state, says Dame Stella Rimington, former head of MI5. By exploiting fears of terrorism – by creating and then manipulating those fears of terrorism – the Government have eroded civil liberties and pushed us further and further into a society of control and mistrust.

So humourless that they don't get the horrible irony of it, the Government have excelled over the last eight years in telling us that we must lose our freedom if we are to have our freedom protected.

Blair and Bush's "War on Terror" – otherwise known as the bombing of an abstract noun – proved such a good slogan that it quickly lost the quote marks and became an accepted and unquestioned concept. Only now has David Miliband admitted that the term was a mistake and counter-productive, saying that "ultimately, the notion is misleading and mistaken".

That the admission came just five days before the end of George Bush's presidency shows just how morally bankrupt this career politician is. If only he'd had the bravery to say something when it could have had any kind of effect. Too little, too late – both morally and politically. Bottom of the class on both counts!

As Dame Rimington went on, “It would be better that the Government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism: that we live in fear and under a police state.”

The sheer ineffectiveness of post-9/11 legislation – from slashing age-old rights to protest to snooping on citizens – is one of the most demoralising aspects of the whole affair.

Dame Stella Rimington in the Daily Telegraph