Alex Deane, director of Big Brother Watch, has produced a book that I warmly recommend.

Published by Biteback, it's called Big Brother Watch: The state of civil liberties in modern Britain and it's available on Amazon and in the larger branches of Waterstone's, like this one in Piccadilly where I bought my copy on Thursday.

You will be familiar with the names of several contributors because they include a number of people who took part in our 2010 Voices of Freedom debates: Guy Herbert, No2ID; Mark Littlewood, IEA; Josie Appleton, Manifesto Club; Philip Johnston, author of Bad Laws: An Explosive Analysis of Britain’s Petty Rules, Health and Safety Lunacies and Madcap Laws; and Alex himself.

Another contributor is Brian Monteith, author of The Bully State: The End of Tolerance, published by The Free Society in 2009. There's also an essay by Simon Davies of Privacy International who has just completed a report commissioned by Forest that we hope to publish next month. Watch this space.

Update: Josie Appleton, director of the Manifesto Club and a contributor to Big Brother Watch (above), has written a piece on the rebellion against the Spanish smoking ban. "It's quite heartening!" she tells me.