Krishnan Guru-Murthy usually makes a competent stand-in for Jon Snow on Channel 4 News, but he has his immature moments and last night he became quite hysterical during the interview attached to this report with Greg Avery of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC).

Avery is not allowed to answer any questions until he accepts that his organisation is no different to ‘Islamic terrorists’. And it’s not enough to answer, ‘Yes of course I do, I’ve done that hundreds of times,’ when asked if he condemns threats to a nursery serving workers at Huntingdon Life Sciences, the laboratory made famous following its infiltration by protestors who filmed abuses and secured the temporary revocation of its licence. ‘I’m struggling to see the difference between you and the Islamic clerics we ask whether they will turn in Islamic terrorists,’ says Krishnan Guru-Murthy. A sentiment Avery reasonably rejects, given his organisation’s killed nobody.

But when Guru-Murthy counters with: ‘It’s defined in law as terrorism; it’s not my definition, that’s the law of the land,’ he’s let down by the very next news item. We’re back to Walter Wolfgang, the 82 year-old heckler who really has been held under terrorism laws. And now, echoing my own thoughts, we’re asked if current definitions of terrorism aren’t just a little too wide with none of this ‘that’s the law of the land’ nonsense.

As Avery repeated points out, Krishnan Guru-Murthy’s determination to apply an increasingly meaningless label to his interviewee can only dumb-down an important and often complex moral debate. It’s a debate we’re going to have to have sometime, so we best end the name calling sooner rather than later and start addressing the real issues.

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‘…there’s a tendency to panic, particularly on terrorism and liberty, that causes the government to forget the bigger picture and drop principle…’

It’s sad that as I wrote that Blair should stay on (albeit for purely tactical reasons) yesterday, I felt a need to qualify support in the face of continued threats to civil liberties. But what’s tragic is that an 82-year-old who joined the Labour Party in 1948 was that day thrown out of conference for heckling (he was unconvinced by Jack Straw’s claims on democracy in Iraq). More importantly he was ‘issued with a section 44 stop and search form under the Terrorism Act’ (whatever that might be).

It’s not always wrong to throw hecklers out of meetings, but the response needs to be proportionate. A group’s a right to meet productively has to be balanced against others’ rights to protest and disrupt. On occasion it’s right to remove people from the scene and, but for that reference the Terrorism Act, it might have been possible to put this incident down to over zealous bouncers. Hecklers can be removed, if need be, for the relatively minor offence of being disorderly.

By invoking the Terrorism Act, the police illustrated a propensity to reach for the big guns. They proved that they cannot be trusted to use their new powers responsibly and that the government’s response to terrorism includes ill thought out panic measures that pose very real threats to our civil liberties.

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I’m not a particularly big fan of Blair, whose style tends to grate, but I should get over that. The main praise that comes to mind is that he’s done a great job of keeping the Tories out, which is a bit negative. But when you consider how bad things were under the Tories and how much worse they’d be (given that they’re now even wackier than before) keeping the Tories out is a big deal. And he’s hit them so hard that ‘Conservative values’ tend to be expressed hysterically (think Daily Mail) and are generally regarded as the products of elderly eccentricities or thinly disguised racism, misogyny and homophobia.

On the positives, it’s generally hard to fault Blair’s intentions but delivery constantly disappoints and there’s a tendency to panic, particularly on terrorism and liberty, that causes the government to forget the bigger picture and drop principle. Where the government has done well, it’s easy to credit Gordon Brown and I’d welcome a Brown administration. I don’t reckon he’d be that different from Blair, but I’d expect a bit more coherence and for government to raise its game in terms of delivery.

But what’s the hurry? The next general election is unlikely to be before 2009 and the electorate, with its famously short memory, will base its decision on events from 2007 onwards. So much of the opposition to government has been personalised (think Backing Blair) that Blair’s retirement (once he’s beaten Thatcher’s record, perhaps) will take the wind (breeze?) out of many opponents’ sails. For this same reason it doesn’t really matter that the Tories are currently leaderless. The soap opera’s going to have to take a back seat, despite Brown giving an heir apparent’s speech to conference.