Is the UK changing into a Police State?

I have a few friends who think that the UK is a police state. In the past I have always argued that the UK is not a police state, but now I am concerned that labour's new proposal to grant the police the power to stop and question anyone with no justification really scares me.

I do not understand what they expect to achieve with this except for pissing everyone off. The bbc news article says that this is part of new anti-terror laws, but I do not see how this would help. William Hague says that they will support them if they really are being introduced, to prevent terrorism, but no one has said how it will prevent terrorism.

The bbc article implies that this is a response to the disappearance of terrorism suspects, but I do not see how randomly questioning innocent members of the public will help. If people are suspects of terrorism already then these powers are not required, and if they are not we would be better off improving our intellegence than randomly stopping people in the street. I doubt very much that terrorists would be tripped up by random questioning in the street.

Tony Blair seems to think that civil liberties are getting in the way of our ability to fight terrorism, but if we destroy what makes this country great what are we really protecting? Our grandparents generation fought two world wars to protect our freedom and to have it destroyed by the party of the working man just goes to show how much Labour has changed.

Alasdair