BBC NEWS | Politics | Taking liberties?: "People will only wake up to the destruction of their civil liberties when it is too late to do anything about it.

That is the fear driving a new documentary film which aims to do for civil liberties what Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore's anti-George Bush polemic, did for the anti-war movement.

Director Chris Atkins wants Taking Liberties to shake the British public out of their apathy over what he sees as the dangerous erosion of traditional rights and freedoms under Tony Blair.

'This film uses shock tactics. We needed to be unashamedly populist.

'We wanted to give people a slap around the face and then they can go away and unearth some of the more complex cases,' says Atkins.

But although it shares a producer - and some stylistic tricks - with Fahrenheit 9/11, Atkins is wary of too many comparisons with Moore's film.

Tony Blair was a 'handy villain', he says, but it is not enough to try and pin the blame on one political leader who is, in any case, standing down soon.

'We didn't want to make the British Fahrenheit. We didn't just want to say 'this guy's an arsehole, let's get rid of him'.

'This issue is far more important than one leader. Once you give up traditional liberties such as free speech and the right to protest you are not going to easily get them back,' says Atkins.

Personal freedom

Tony Blair has often insisted that he understands the need to balance new police powers with the protection of civil liberties - but he is also confident he has public opinion on his side when it comes to fighting terror.

His argument, as he explains in an archive clip in the film, is that it would only take one more atrocity to silence the civil libertarians, and have people asking why he had not gone further.

Atkins' argument - told through a mix of animation, news footage and interviews - is that Labour has over-reacted to the terror threat, using it as an excuse to bring in a series of alarming curbs on personal freedom.

'If I had died, I would not have wanted the constitution to be shredded on my behalf,' says Rachel North, who was injured in the 7 July attacks, at one poin"

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