One year on from Madeleine’s abduction, I’m afraid I believe the worst. My thoughts are with Gerry and Kate McCann who are now doing their utmost to help other families who may one day find themselves in this terrible situation by urging an Amber Alert warning system to be set up throughout Europe similar to the American version. It is a system desperately needed.

And my thoughts today are also with Steve Cook’s loving family (pic left) after he vanished in Crete in September 2005. I met them during the march for missing people in London in March. Steve’s disappearance featured on BBC’s Missing Live programme this morning.

In memory of those who are still missing.

This guest post highlights an issue I feel strongly about and and has recently been featured by the media, including the BBC, Amateur Photography, Radio 5 Live, as well as the House of Commons.

Misplaced and irrational fears over terrorism and paedophiles is leading to situations where innocent amateur photographers and professional photo journalists are being detained by police and PCSOs for simply taking pictures in public places. I have recently been in this situation when taking pictures such as the one above. It causes alarm and fear when you know that you have not transgressed any law. I was left confused and angry after thinking that all of my movements had apparently been watched on CCTV, yet despite this an officer of Northumbria Police was still detailed to come and apprehend me. Should fears be allowed to interrupt the good administration of the law? You can read what happened to me here.

There are number of issues confronting us here, and the first that needs to be dealt with is the motive and fear of the individuals who make the judgement call in the first place (to either telephone the police, or to respond to that call and despatch a police officer.) To call the police because another member of the public is taking pictures, legally and openly, leaves me dismayed to say the least. I ask myself: “What has happened to neighbourliness and community spirit when people just don’t have the confidence to come and ask what I am doing?”

I blame the proliferation of CCTV cameras which is leading to a general complacency about reporting real crimes and providing real statements that help police, people assume that CCTV operators will see everything accurately and that therefore everything will be O.K. This is not the case, and real crimes still happen openly in front of CCTV cameras - how do we know? We see the pictures in our newspapers asking: “Do you know this person?” In my case a thorough examination of the evidence seen by CCTV cameras would have led to the conclusion that there was insufficient evidence to create even the remotest suspicion that crime was being committed or was about to be committed.

Next question, if hundreds of people in a fairground are using pocket digital cameras, or camera phones, why should the man with the Digital SLR arouse more suspicion than the others? If I were a paedophile or a terrorist, why should I want to stick out like a sore thumb? Perversely, if one person objects to being photographed in public, or thinks it’s wrong that children in a fairground might get photographed, have they ever taken the time to object to the hundreds of CCTV cameras that recorded their every movement since leaving the house that morning? Another question for those who are living their lives in fear, have they ever thought that the vast majority of criminals who abuse children were actually well known to their victims? Have they ever thought that they should worry a little less about strangers and a little more about those closest to them?

There is no law which guarantees privacy in public places in this country, yet authorities are becoming more and more ready to stop photographers from using their cameras to record street scenes, even asking them to delete the frames that they have already recorded. A man was recently detained by seven people in Middlesbrough after taking photographs, then released without charge, again as a result of misconstrued fears. If we allow these actions to continue our newspapers, magazines, websites and journals will become as dull as dishwater without photographs to illustrate the content, moreover photographers both professional and amateur will have little to offer future generations when they come to look at how we lived at the beginning of the new millennium.

It is for these reasons that I am supporting the Early Day Motion by Austin Mitchell the MP for Great Grimsby to have Police, PCSOs, security officers and other officials made more aware of the current laws in relation to our rights to take photographs in and from public places, it has now attracted the signatures of 185 other MPs. I am fortunate that my own MP and Foreign Secretary David Miliband is a regular reader of my blog and recently wrote to me saying that he had received assurances from Home Office Minister Tony McNulty firmly that photography in public is perfectly legal.

We cannot allow our lives to be ruled by silly fears, nor dictated by officials who are not fully aware of our law, nor can we sit back and let this generation pass by without being accurately recorded for the benefit of future generations. Paedophiles or terrorists should not be carelessly allowed to dictate the agenda!

How could her evil husband, Josef Fritzl, 73, sneak in food and clothing for his daughter and three captive children over 24 years without her noticing anything odd?

And what about good old-fashioned woman’s intuition, did Rosemarie Fritzl really believe her pretty daughter had simply vanished from their home in Austria and had no suspicions at all? Was she also a victim of her husband’s abusive and controlling character?

How many women turn a blind eye when their husbands abuse their innocent daughters, and the helpless, young girl knows she will not be believed? Fritzl is reported to have begun abusing his daughter Elisabeth from the time she was 11 years old.

Fritzl has confessed to imprisoning his daughter in a windowless cellar for 24 years and fathering her seven children, one of whom died. The electrical engineering technician would enter the basement prison through a small hidden door at his home, opened by a secret keyless entry code.

I wonder what would have happened to those pitiful, helpless prisoners if their wicked captor had died suddenly, would they simply have been left to rot in the cellar?

He raises a good point about increased prices of fertilisers, many poor farmers are unable to afford it and this further exacerbates the global food crisis.

The prospect of travelling to Strasbourg for the week has never filled me with any great sense of joy, and this time was no different. After five consecutive weeks of staying in Brussels and the UK, I was beginning to get used to this somewhat less frantic rhythm of life. All good things come to an end though. So yet again MEPs, assistants and the like made the environmentally-unfriendly pilgrimage to the “official” European Parliament in France, spilling thousands of tons of carbon in the air so that the EU can continue with its pressing battle against climate change and greenhouse gases. Apparently pleasing the French is far more important than practising what we preach!

While federalist Eurocrats look to climate change as the 21st century justification for bringing European Member States even closer together, over the past year, we have been reminded why the European Union was formed in the first place - to produce sufficient amounts of food. Now, as food prices continue to rise, European politicians are starting to get a little nervous and it was no surprise that food security was a major issue for debate in plenary this week. Suddenly the importance of food is being reflected in the price and some are beginning to realise that Europe, with its favourable climate and land quality, has a moral duty to increase production. It seems we have come full circle, after decades of grain-mountains and wine lakes; we are now facing a situation similar to the period immediately after the Second World War.

Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform is being mentioned as the best possible way to confront this departure from the cheap food era and this is starting to reveal underlying frictions between Europe’s member states. France’s Agriculture Minister, Michel Barnier has hit out at people like me who want to use this upturn in market prices to pull farmers from the subsidy traps of yesteryear. Monsieur Barnier has shown why, despite all the rhetoric and propaganda of a unified Europe that spills out of Brussels, national interests are still very much in the minds of many a politician. It is no surprise that Monsieur Barnier has called for an increase in the CAP budget, when French farmers receive more subsidy than any other member state. This would be a major step backwards for UK farmers who now have a freedom to farm whatever they like according to market prices and demand. Rather than complicating the CAP even further, this would be a good time to get rid of so much of the red tape that has stifled European agricultural production over the years and let our farmers get on with producing food

It is not just the demand for food that is pushing up prices, it is the production costs as well. Oil prices are spiralling to new heights, hauling up prices for essential fertiliser ingredients such as phosphate, nitrogen and potash. Speaking in Parliament, I called upon Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson to stop the anti-dumping legislation on these products when they come into the European Union before being shipped out to those developing countries which need them so greatly. At the moment this legislation is forcing up fertilizer prices at an alarming rate; with all the negative press that biofuels have been receiving over the past few months, it is imperative that the bigger picture is looked at and that politicians and the public realise that food production is reliant on a wider range of factors - we cannot keep using biofuels as a scapegoat.

I’m not just referring to environment factors, but also political ones. Well governed countries tend to have a solid and sustainable agricultural sector. This is why I voted alongside my Conservative colleagues on several resolutions putting pressure on Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe to accept defeat and allow for the democratisation of a country which used to feed itself and half of Southern Africa, but is now home to millions of starving people.