Jack Straw is almost correct when he says that it is completely unacceptable for an MP to be bugged while attending to constituency business. Generally, everyone should be free to speak to their member of Parliament or legal representatives without being monitored.

However, the bugging by Scotland Yard of an MP's visit to a prison is no more offensive than the powers for more than 650 bodies, including local authorities, the ambulance service and the Financial Services Authority, to tap the phones of each and every one of us; powers that enable them to go on fishing expeditions to combat crimes as serious as fly-tipping and benefit fraud.

The bugging is also less intrusive than the requirement for communication providers to maintain records of all our phone and internet traffic for two years, in case the government wishes to see who we have been talking to. And it is certainly less disturbing than the Home Office's plans to place us all under continual automatic surveillance using the national identity scheme.

Sympathy for Sadiq Khan MP must be tempered by the knowledge that, despite being a former chairman of Liberty, since entering Parliament he has consistently backed the government's privacy-eroding measures. His outrage at being bugged could be regarded as somewhat hypocritical.

It is a fundamental tenet of a representative democracy that law-makers should be subject to the same laws that they impose upon the rest of us. We all have a right to privacy and information security.

When they have got over their self-interested outrage, MPs should consider how they can start to restore the privacy of everyone, not just themselves.

Geraint Bevan, 3e Grovepark Gardens, Glasgow.