From the article:
"Her position is ironic considering her first act in government, way back in 2010, to repeal Labour's Identity Cards Act 2006. May claimed the Act would not “keep us safe without intruding on civil liberties” and continuing that while “some data storage is essential,” in her explanation to Parliament, “these events do not point in the direction of a massive expansion of the surveillance state, which ID cards would necessarily involve.”
The ID card scheme's planned use of biometrics was mathematically flawed. It was never going to be able to deliver what was wanted because the biometric ID part of that was going to be insufficiently reliable. One might therefore argue that binning the scheme was actually a well measured move on May's part, as nothing good was going for come from having all that data on file, all that equipment in place, etc.
"David Davis, currently Brexit secretary, so disliked the PM's last attempt at a Snoopers' Charter that he with others took the country to the EU's highest court. The resulting judgment seems to put much of the UK's new data retention regime to challenge."
Ah yes, David Davis, the man who resigned from the then shadow cabinet in protest at something that the then Labour government was doing. Can't remember what it was all about, but the lasting impression his protest made was "idiot": it's a Shadow Cabinet politician's job to criticise government where necessary, something you cannot do if you quit. A hollow gesture at best, and at the very least it was poor judgment.
Anyway, the true irony is that whilst many may look upon Europe as a means to moderate whatever 'excesses' one might perceive to be built into the IPA, some (e.g. France) and probably many other European governments are planning or implementing similar laws.
The wave of attacks on various blameless and/or beneficient European countries (what's Belgium ever done to annoy anyone? Chocolate?) has finally woken them up. We're all at risk from such attacks, and a policy of non-involvement in the world's trouble spots and a laissez-faire attitude to what's happening in communities in your own capital city is not good armour against them.
The EU and ECJ may witter on about open borders and human rights, but European politicians now realise that there's elections to be lost through inaction and failure to prevent repeat attacks. Everyone remembers that the ruling party in Spain lost the next general election immediately after the Madrid train bombings. There's nothing like the prospect of losing their job to make politicians engage in hard realpolitiks.
Anyway, my point about Britons seeking redress in the ECJ about what they perceive to be the excess of the IPA is that if any government tells the ECJ to back off it might not be the UK government that ends up doing that.
What would be truly excessive is not having laws (or having very weak laws) about what the state can and cannot do in the area of domestic security, and then making it up on the spot or doing things with no legal top cover in response to the popular backlash against a government hitherto inattentive to such matters. For example, France is still officially in a state of emergency. Who knows what they're doing under that cover. And last time I was there (Nov) there's still troops on the streets of Brussels. This is far from "normal".
An interesting listen on such topics is the Reith lectures given by Eliza Manningham-Buller, former head of MI5.
All things considered I'd far rather have open laws on domestic surveillance and security than opaque states of emergency, or no laws at all. Whether or not they're effective laws or not time will tell.