It is astonishing that, in the week when the world remembered Auschwitz with particular poignancy on the 60th anniversary of its liberation, our Government chose to announce Gestapo-like measures that would allow indefinite detention without trial, purely on the say-so of the Home Secretary.

It is less astonishing, though sad, that this repressive measure has failed to provoke a furious public outcry.

While we pay lip service to Britain as the home of liberty, most citizens are sanguine about any relaxation in the rule of law that targets undesirables. "It won't affect me," the theory goes. "And if we're talking about suspected terrorists, and we are, the Government must have good reason for wanting them locked up. Just as well to keep them out of the way even if nothing can be proved."

But laws passed for a special reason have a nasty habit of being applied more widely. Besides, freedom is indivisible. Last weekend this newspaper published a picture of campaigners for some asylum seekers from Zimbabwe. They held a placard which bore an adapted version of a poem by Martin Niemoller, a First World War German submarine commander, later a Christian priest, who was imprisoned in Germany from 1937 to 1945 for opposing Nazism.

Here is the complete poem. Read it, and then consider whether you believe that, except in gravest national emergency, detention without trial can ever be acceptable.

When the Nazis came for the Communists, I kept silent.

After all, I was no Communist.

When they came for the Social Democrats, I kept silent.

After all, I was no Social Democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists, I kept silent.

After all I was no trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews, I kept silent.

After all, I was no Jew.

When they came for me - there was nobody left who could protest.

I knew it was too good to last. A few years ago I walked the riverbank between Stockton and Middlesbrough. Very different from my usual walking habitat out on the North York Moors, it gave me such pleasure that I repeated the experience.

Though most of the surroundings were a wasteland, it struck me as amazing that, almost 200 years after the explosive birth of modern Middlesbrough, which also hastened Stockton's transformation from a market town, it was possible to walk on an open riverside linking the two towns.

Degraded the land might have been. But with huts, bits of marshland, and, below the (excellent) barrier, tidal mud supporting abundant birdlife, it had a lot of character. And my walk gave me the true feeling of having left one place and arrived at another.

The trouble with towns is that they see all open land as awaiting development. So this wilderness waterfront which, with a little tidying up has the capacity to be a wonderful open-air riverside lung at the heart of Teesside, is to be yet another aggregation of hotels, offices, university buildings, homes, and something unpromisingly called "mixed use" (probably mainly light industry), rounded off with a car showroom. What a shame.