In January, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Britain's s. 44 stop and search powers were unlawful. The last government lodged an appeal and judgment was given today. Britain lost.
Good.
Random stop and search was an abuse of our historic, hard-won liberties. I don't want to live in a society in which a representative of the state can march up to you and demand without just cause or reasonable suspicion and ask, "your papers please" - or demand your name and address, what you're doing there, where you're going. I suspect that you don't want that situation either.
These powers were also unnecessary - no successful prosecutions for terrorism offences resulted from these draconian powers. They served only to intimidate, and to empower officials to intrude on us and our privacy without just cause.
The old government should never have appealed and once again - as with the defeat of Britain's policy of retaining DNA profiles of innocent people on the database, or the British approval of the conviction of people in criminal cases based on the evidence of absent witnesses - I find myself - a patriot, and a Eurosceptic - in the peculiar situation of being glad that lawyers representing my country have been defeated in the European court.