Orwell's 1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual

Restriction of our fundamental rights and freedoms has gone too far. ID cards, more CCTV cameras per head than any country in the world, a database of children's fingerprints, a government that wants to conceal its own record on the disastrous war in Iraq - it's the stuff of fiction.

We need to put a stop to this. The Liberal Democrats are proposing the Freedom Bill: http://freedom.libdems.org.uk.

I need you to look at the bill and comment to tell me how to improve it. What's missing? What's wrong? Is your civil liberties "hobby-horse" not on our list? If you haven't time to comment, you can sign our petition in support of the bill instead.

Here's a selection of the measures incorporated in our first draft:

• Scrap ID cards for everyone.

• Restore the right to protest in Parliament Square.

• Scrap the ContactPoint database of all children in Britain.

• Remove innocent people from the DNA database.

• Reduce the maximum period of pre-charge detention to 14 days.

You can read the full set on the website at http://freedom.libdems.org.uk.

I need your contribution to make this bill as robust as possible - because it's not going to be easy getting this on the parliamentary agenda. The other two parties won't like it, we can depend upon that.

I want to take forward a bill we can all be proud of. I hope you will join me in making it clear to the government that Orwell's nightmarish 1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual.