Likewise the continued push for mass surveillance (see: DRIPA, the defunct Draft Communications Data Bill and the seemingly inevitable Investigatory Powers Bill) is another - the most recent legislative attempts have been to make legal what the state has been doing illegally for many, many years. What worries me is that there is no common-law right to privacy in English law; our modern privacy rights stem almost exclusively from the ECHR and the EU.

The recent clampdown on the rights of trades unions is a third example. Despite an historic low number of days lost to industrial action, the government has been making it much harder to legally strike, or even to _fund_ trades unions (for example, imposing high thresholds on ballots and attempting to remove the option of payroll funding for union membership).