As I sit on a train from Vienna to Budapest, on what will end up being a 36 hour journey from my home in rural Perthshire to the gig I am going to tonight, I can’t help reflect on observations made on the trip.  I thought that a day and a half of planes, trains, buses and undergrounds would be an invaluable learning experience whatever the outcome.

So what have I observed? Well German trains are no more punctual than ours. You didn’t expect that, did you? That’s right, it may have been more plush, but the late arrival of the train from Munich still meant I spent two hours in Vienna. For the first time in my life I experienced brassiere roasted Kartoffel and chestnuts, surrounded by Christmas lights, whilst waiting for the next train to Hungary. It just goes to show you can have a warm, pleasurable and liberating experience, yet remain trapped where you don’t want to be!

So the Germans aren’t that different from us, but a conversation with an Irish woman on the way into Berlin from the airport made me wonder how different modern day Britain is from pre Glasnost Eastern Europe. She had lived in Budapest as communism crumbled and talked of the gains made in terms of Eastern Block freedom. I had been in Hungary before myself and, when I visited the House of Terror museum, I wondered how people at that time could inform on their neighbours and live with their conscience. To this my travelling companion added the fact that people were spied on at every turn, trapped in a system that constricted them like a boa’s crush, till all hope and the last breath expired. Not only were they watching you, but they wouldn’t let you go.

Clearly this is a world away from modern day Britain. Cameras on every street corner, for our protection. DNA databases of people who have committed no crime fly in the face of European human rights law, but for our protection. Identity cards with biometric data, for our protection. Ordinary people attend a demonstration and are photographed, filmed logged and watched by police observing ‘domestic extremists’ – all for our protection. There is, still lurking in the shadows, the desire to extend DNA records to all from birth and biometric records to anyone who orders a new passport.

So does that mean that if I want to leave the country I am going to have to conform to a passport that gives the government my biometric data, with who knows what purpose for the future? Does that mean that ministers have genuinely considered refusing travel outside the UK to anyone who does not conform? That’s certainly not how they would put it. Not quite an iron curtain, but a biometric firewall. Not quite the visible wall that stood in Berlin, but in a modern technological world pretty much the same thing.

Obviously I don’t think we are in the same place as some of the brave, principled and helpless victims, who breathed their last in Budapest’s house of terror, but I do think those who blithely say: “If you haven’t committed a crime what have you to be afraid of?” need to look back as well as beyond.

The Grand Canyon was not created overnight. It was the result of slow, continual, imperceptible, and ultimately inescapable erosion over many years. Let’s be sure we don’t allow a drip to start that means our children look back over an insurmountable chasm, to find they are no longer afraid of terrorists, but the state itself.

Bruce Fummey is a finalist in stv.tv's The Write Factor competition. The views expressed are not necessarily those of STV plc. If you would like to read more from this writer, use our comment system below.