Imagine if I asked you to keep a record of every website you visited over the next 12 months and then to hand the list over to the police. Or what if I told you that the list might end up on the internet for everyone to see? You might think twice about some of the sites you click on, and I imagine you would not be very happy about the idea.

Well, I do not need to ask you because the government is passing a law, about to finish its final stages in parliament, that will force your internet service provider, whether it be Virgin Media, Sky or BT, to keep that list for you. If the police then tell your service provider they think you may have done something wrong, it will be handed over to them without a warrant. Don’t worry, they say, if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide. Well, if you need help with an addiction problem, do you want the police to know that you visited drugabuse.gov? What if, like me, you were in a straight marriage but thought you might be gay; would you want anyone to know you had visited stonewall.org.uk before you were sure?

Half of US adults are recorded in police facial recognition databases, study says Read more

We all know that secure databases are not that secure and that this information, once stored, could be hacked into and the details posted on the internet. It happened to Ashley Madison’s clients and 157,000 TalkTalk customers who had their personal data stolen in 2015. Would you then be surprised to hear that in parliament on Monday, the chief executive of TalkTalk, Dido Harding, now a Conservative baroness, spoke in favour, and voted in favour, of storing her own customers’ web histories so they could be handed over to the police on demand? Would you be equally surprised that, while Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary, said on Tuesday that the new law, the investigatory powers bill, was “draconian” and that the legislation “needed amending”, her Labour party colleagues in the House of Lords were voting with the Tory government against a Liberal Democrat amendment that would have stopped “internet connection records” (ICRs, aka your web history) being stored by the internet companies?

I was a police officer for over 30 years and retired with an exemplary record as one of the most senior officers at Scotland Yard. If I thought the changes Liberal Democrats sought to make to this bill would have made any of us less safe, I could not have supported them. As I told the House of Lords on Monday: “I am a lousy politician. I cannot stand here and say things that I do not believe just because they are my party’s policy. I am opposing this because I genuinely oppose the disproportionate invasion of privacy that ICRs represent.” Only three Labour peers voted with us – I only wish the former Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti had been one of them.

There will be some who argue that threats such as terrorism and child sexual exploitation demand that we give up some of our freedoms in order to stay safe. In preparation for the debates on the bill, I visited the MI6 building in Vauxhall Cross (which didn’t really get blown up in Skyfall) and GCHQ. I was told by the security and intelligence agencies they did not want and did not need ICRs in order to keep us safe. GCHQ even has a joint unit with the National Crime Agency that tackles online child sexual exploitation. Law enforcement agencies, mainly the police, claim they need ICRs, even though they do not have them now and there are serious doubts that they will be of any practical use. How then, can such a massive invasion of people’s privacy be justified, when serious crime and terrorism can be successfully tackled without ICRs?

All this will be done at huge cost to the taxpayer, at serious risk to privacy and without any certainty that it will make any of us any safer. This is just one of the powers Liberal Democrats have opposed in this draconian bill, powers that will enter into law because Labour supported them.