From what I’ve seen criminal damage and trespassing already adequately covers this area of law, but these lesser laws don’t confer sufficient powers which address the political context of their commission and therefore are less of a priority when it comes to allocating enforcement resources.

In this sense the artificial creation of the new term ‘terrorism’ is understandably applied to protests, but it fails to take into account the distinction between the various natures of non-violent protesting (traffic disturbance, trespass etc) and politically motivated crimes (bombing, murder etc).

As such it is not even a case of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but of using the sledgehammer to cut a cake – it is prinicpally a matter of using legislation to paper over the cracks opened up by insufficient resources for law-enforcement.

Getting back to the topic at hand, this is where DD’s single-issue crusade falls down. Civil liberties aren’t enough on their own, they demand institutional and organisational support to prevent chaos and repression entering the vacuum left by any neglect.

In this way a good police force, properly trained, regulated and sufficiently resouced for the job becomes a force for liberty, when a demoralised, confused and stretched force becomes a tool of authoritarianism.

He laid special emphasis on how regular forms of protest, for example against GM crops, are now being defined as acts of terrorism.

Do you mean the protests where property is destroyed?

Such actions do fall within the legal definition of terrorism. I’m not sure they should be classed as terrorism, but they certainly seem wrong.