THE introduction of closed-circuit television cameras at Ilkley bus station will be welcomed by many as a major step forward in crime prevention and detection.

Criminals prefer to operate in areas where there is little chance of their activities being casually observed, let alone recorded for the posterity of a future court case.

While many in Ilkley have called for security cameras to be placed in other areas, like the central car park, others feel uneasy at the wholesale surveillance blanket covering every aspect of our lives.

Of course, there is the police insistence that law-abiding people have nothing to fear from their activities being monitored and recorded along with the criminals.

But the same argument could be used for even more draconian security measures such as identity cards, compulsory DNA testing and fingerprinting of the whole population.

A few years ago, any film maker wanting to project an image of a repressive, authoritarian society could simply screen a series of shots of surveillance cameras in public places to immediately immerse the audience in the harrowing world of George Orwell's '1984'.

Nowadays we seem to accept this nightmare vision of the future as casual reality and even call for more security measures to be installed.

Whether our clamour for security and fear of crime actually matches up to the reality, particularly in a place like Ilkley, could be a question for another debate.

But for the moment we all seem to accept that a rigidly-monitored society is preferable to one which is fractured by appalling crime statistics.

In the wrong hands, the systematic observation of public places could be open to misuse. But at the moment the gradual erosion of civil liberty seems the price we are all prepared to pay for the privilege of going about our business in safety.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.