Officers at UK borders can detain and question travellers at will – “with or without good reason”. Some 60,000 people are stopped each year under the sweeping powers granted by Schedule 7. They have no right to legal representation; no right to silence; and no right to know the reason for their detention. The vast majority are held for less than an hour, and only a handful are kept for more than six.

Recently, the Brazilian partner of an American journalist – The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald – was detained as he passed through Heathrow en route from Berlin to Rio de Janeiro, and questioned for nine hours under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act (2000), the maximum of legal time. There is no suggestion that either David Miranda or his partner are terrorists. It seems Greenwald’s “crime” – and Miranda’s by association – was to have broken stories about UK and US state surveillance based on leaks from the NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden. No valid reason has been given by the police for this detention.

In the UK it is clear that the police are out of control in a so-called democracy. We cannot expect a Tory government to rein them in. We have to wait until an uninterested public notice that their freedoms have effectively disappeared. Then what? Epicurus would probably tell us to retire to the garden, on the basis that, since the citizenry appear indifferent to freedom and democracy, there is nothing Epicureans can do to rescue them.