EU used as conduit of New Labour authoritarianism

EU Referendum has highlighted New Labour using the EU as a cover for pushing more of it's favoured authoritarian legislation onto hte statute books

"The proposed directive will force telecommunication companies to store logs of all fixed and mobile telephony traffic for one year while internet traffic will have to be kept for six months. The proposal requires the identity and addresses of both the sender and receiver be stored."

So pushing measures that they could get through in Parliment onto our statute books by the totally unaccountable method of an EU directive which has no democratic accountability. They claim that this is all to do with terrorism, however there is evidence to point to other motives

Nor is the proposed law confined just to terrorism, as the records will be more generally available to the authorities to help prevent, investigate, detect and prosecute "criminal offences" and to assist in tracing suspects.

Furthermore, in a style typical of the commission, the term "telecom provider" is not clearly defined. Thus, many businesses which currently own telephone exchanges could be covered by the regulations. Even hotels could be obliged to keep records of their guests' telephone calls.

And, as always, there is no indication of who is expected to pay for the regime. Set up costs in the UK alone are estimated to be €180 million (£124m), while annual running costs could be as high as €50 million (£34.5m).