Mobilising opposition to the government’s surveillance legislation is difficult because the British have become intellectually lazy about defending liberty, the Conservative MP David Davis has said.

Davis said it was astonishing how cavalier people were about liberty, citing the fact that Britons have no recent experience of living under a police state as an explanation.

He also said that his detailed reading of the draft investigatory powers bill published last Wednesday led him to believe there were “loads and loads of holes in it”.

Davis, one of the Commons’s most prominent libertarians (although he prefers the term “rule of law enthusiast”), told the Guardian in an interview that it was hard getting people to take an interest in what was at risk from the legislation.

“In every other country in the world, post-Snowden, people are holding their government’s feet to the fire on these issues, but in Britain we idly let this happen,” he said. “We’re the country that invented James Bond and we like our spies. We have a wonderful illusion about our security services, a very comforting illusion. But it means we’re too comfortable.

“Because for the past 200 years we haven’t had a Stasi or a Gestapo, we are intellectually lazy about it, so it’s an uphill battle. Even people who are broadly on my side of the political spectrum in believing in privacy and liberty tend to take the state at its word too often.”

Davis said that his main objection to the bill was its “double-lock” procedure intended to ensure interception warrants have to be signed by a judge and not just a secretary of state, as happens under the current system). It was flawed because judges would only be allowed to refuse warrants on judicial review principles, he said, which meant they could only consider procedure, not evidence.

“As long as the home secretary has followed the correct procedure, the judge will go along with it,” he said. “Judges hate overturning the executive, and it happens very rarely.”