The UK government has announced plans to create its own version of the FBI, the Serious Organized Crime Agency (which will no doubt be known to this football-mad administration as SOCA). Fair enough, you might think: how can disparate local police forces fight the mafias?

But I still find it unnerving. It's not just that it's going to employ 5000 people (and where are they going to come from - yet more new public job-creation, or taken from existing hard-stretched police forces?). Nor that it will cost zillions. What really worried me is the Prime Minister saying that perhaps the burden of proof in organized crime cases would be lowered to, in order to make them easier to prosecute.

Let's face it, earlier generations fought and died to create the rule of law in what became the UK. Now we're just tearing up those rights. Already we've suspended the right of silence in fraud cases. If you call someone a terrorist you can hold them for weeks without trial. And now, if the state accuses you of drug-running or pimping, forget your ancient civil rights.

These diversions from the rule of law are too easy for the authorities to exploit. The RICO racketeering laws in the US are now routinely used against any businessperson accused of any fraud - since the penalties are so draconian, people gladly plea-bargain and admit to some lesser charge, even if they are not guilty of it. That's not justice, not the rule of law.

You'd have much less organized crime if you made fewer things criminal. The Chief Constable of North Wales has said that even heroin should be decriminalized because that would be better than what we have now. He's probably right. Same with prostitution. We don't need this new agency and this new opportunity to violate our rights. We need freedom.