Taking Liberties, 12A, 105mins

Chris Atkins’s film Taking Liberties is a grainy piece of newsreel montage about the Labour Government’s broken promises over civil liberties. It begins with a coach journey to an antiIraq War rally where the police arrest assorted pensioners for wearing masks. It ends with the same piece of footage nearly two hours later, after charting the Government’s extraordinary knee-jerk reactions since “the War on Terror” was declared.

I came out of this eloquent mugging exhausted and in despair. It’s a film that champions free speech by a director who once championed Blair. But the case is pure dynamite. Would the Tony Blair of 1995 defend the Tony Blair of 2007? The montage of evidence suggests that we have been living in a police state for almost ten years. Atkins documents the creeping grip of CCTV cameras and the blizzard of new laws that stifle simple freedoms. The film asks hard questions about the effect the Iraq War is having on personal privacy – and the answers are shocking.

What happens to our ancient democratic rights when we need them most? The portly figure of Boris Johnson looms large and sensible out of one short interview with some wonderful advice to Government about identity cards: “Just butt out of it.”

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