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Hat tip to a wonderful post from South Africa about Britain's surveillance culture in which Chris Rodrigues reminds us that it was Nicolae Ceausescu who often pushed the surveillance state in totalitarian Romania with the now much overused saying that "if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to worry about".

We hear it all the time in Britain whenever someone starts complaining about the "surveillance state", as if just not being a criminal makes it okay to have your movements tracked, your DNA held on file or your telephone tapped. And yet again, in the wake of the two high profile convictions last week of Steve Wright and Mark Dixie, people have been calling for a full national DNA database.

Whilst it's not a terribly palatable subject, one wonders just how many DNA samples one might collect from a prostitute. Their work gets pretty intimate. One of these two fiends was on the existing database yet that doesn't seem to have been enough for the police - they want us all on the database, so they can trawl through every little sample they find at a crime scene, presumably using more computer power than Los Alamos to match up then round up casual crime scene visitors who will have nothing to do with the crime yet inevitably some will end up having to explain their innocent presence there.

No, it's time to call a halt to this expansion of the creepy, big brother state. My DNA is part of me. I may unwittingly leave bits of it lying around all over the place but to take some off me for cataloguing and storage is it seems to me a breach of habeas corpus. You're asking to hold a little bit of me in perpetuity, like a miniature electronic tag so you can reel me in whenever my DNA appears anywhere near a crime.

The fact is that Steve Wright and Mark Dixie were caught and were convicted. The existence or not of their DNA on a super-duper database doesn't seem to have prevented justice being done eventually. Good old police work was what did for them. That's where it should stop.

In the shadow of Crewe and Nantwich but much closer to home we have an Oxford City Council by-election. And we have the apparently imminent prospect of a by-election for Boris's Westminster seat of Henley. The Henley headquarters is now open for business in Thame and, in a departure for me (!), I have been to offer my help. I'm not doing that phone thing - I'm sorry, canvassing is traumatic enough for me when I can see the colour of the front door before I knock! But there is lots of delivery to do (or was when I was there mid-afternoon on Friday) and I've got a bundle to do in Benson over the weekend.

So if anyone in Oxford without transport wants to help before things get into full swing for the city council by-election, let me know and I can pick up more, drop you off at the HQ, take a (small!) gang out delivering or something.