Thomas Ash (Oxford, OK): On Wednesday the Daily Mail ran a report which would have seemed like an April Fools' story were it not entirely of a piece with the many examples of obtuse officiousness collected by the Convention on Modern Liberty research team earlier this year. It describes how Paul Leicester, a college student from Southport, handed a mobile phone he had found in to the police only to be arrested for 'theft by finding' and held for four hours; you can read it here.
The Mail and its commenters unfailingly connect these stories to the narrative of New Labour control freakery, but they pop up wherever officials are given power over people without being responsible to them - and that is not just Britain since 1997. If the volume of these stories (and not simply the volume reported in a hostile paper like the Mail) have increased since Labour came to power it is because, in creating almost 4,000 new criminal offences, they have inevitably expanded such power. Paul Leicester's experience is yet another reminder of how the exercise of this power - which now includes the taking of fingerprints, DNA samples and a photo from those like Leicester - differs from the picture with which it is sold, in which those who would steal mobile phones, rather than those who would try to return them, are the only ones with anything to fear.