While checking some of the background for yesterday’s blog on liberties, I found this comment attributed to the former Conservative British Prime Minister Ted Heath, dated from the 1970s and recalled by Alan Hart, a former BBC journalist in a letter to the Guardian last November:

I am reminded of something Ted Heath said to me, about a year after he ceased to be prime minister. I asked him what he most feared for the future – and expected him to say something like: “Catastrophe if we fail to address the problem of global poverty.” What he actually said was: “Britain will become the first police state in the democratic world.”