Several years ago Tony Blair attempted to deport an Egyptian human rights lawyer who had been the victim of truly terrible torture in his own country: Blair argued that an assurance from Egypt of the man’s safety would suffice. Unusually, during a court challenge to the legality of his detention, private memoranda between Blair and the Home Office were made public. Across a note from the Home Office expressing concern that even hard assurances given by Egypt were unlikely to provide real protection against torture and execution, Blair had scribbled: ‘Get them back.’ Beside the passage about the assurances he wrote: ‘This is a bit much. Why do we need all these things?’ The man succeeded in his court challenge, but today, on the basis of secret information provided by Egypt, he is the subject of a UN Assets Freezing Order managed by the Treasury. He has no assets, no income and no work, and can be given neither money nor ‘benefit’ without a licence. ‘Benefit’ includes eating the meals his wife cooks. She requires a licence to cook them, and is obliged to account for every penny spent by the household. She speaks little English and is disabled, so is compelled to pass the obligation onto their children, who have to submit monthly accounts to the Treasury of every apple bought from the market, every bus fare to school. Failure to do so constitutes a criminal and imprisonable offence.

We remain extremely concerned about the impact of control orders on the subject of the orders, their families and their communities. There can be no doubt that the degree of control over the minutiae of controlees' daily lives, together with the length of time spent living under such restrictions and their apparently indefinite duration, have combined to exact a heavy price on the mental health of those subjected to control orders. The severe impact on the female partners and children of the controlees, including on their enjoyment of their basic economic and social rights as well as their right to family life, is an example of the "collateral impact" of counter-terrorism measures recently identified by the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism...

We are particularly concerned about the apparent increase in resort to conditions in control orders which amount to internal exile, banishing an individual and, effectively, his family, from his and their community. We have very grave reservations about the use of such historically despotic executive orders, and the contribution they undoubtedly make to "the folklore of injustice."

The most deadly criticism one could make of modern civilisation is that apart from its man-made crises and catastrophes, it is not humanly interesting...

In the end, such a civilisation can produce only a mass man: incapable of choice, incapable of spontaneous, self-directed activities: at best patient, docile, disciplined to monotonous work to an almost pathetic degree, but increasingly irresponsible as his choices become fewer and fewer: finally, a creature governed mainly by his conditioned reflexes - the ideal type desired, if never quite achieved, by the advertising agency and the sales organisations of modern business, or by the propaganda office and the planning bureaus of totalitarian and quasi-totalitarian government. The handsomest encomium for such creatures is: 'They do not make trouble'. Their highest virtue is: 'They do not stick their necks out'. Ulitmately such a society produces only two groups of men: the conditioners and the conditioned; the active and the passive barbarians.