LONDON (AP);

A senior British lawmaker quit Parliament yesterday in a maverick political move, saying he plans to force and win a special election by exposing what he called the government's steady erosion of the country's civil liberties.

David Davis, a former leadership contender with the opposition Conservative Party, made his surprising decision to trigger the election after Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government narrowly won a vote on toughening terrorism laws.

Re-election campaign

The lawmaker, his party's spokesman on law and order issues, said his campaign for re-election will focus exclusively on what he termed the government's "slow strangulation of fundamental British freedoms".

An election in his northern England district of Howden and Haltemprice is likely to take place before the end of July.

Davis said he was taking a stand to protest planned laws that will allow police to hold suspected terrorists for up to six weeks without filing charges against them, and to denounce an array of intrusions on personal freedoms.

"We will have shortly the most intrusive identity card system in the world. A CCTV camera for every 14 citizens, a DNA database bigger than any dictatorship has, with thousands of innocent children and millions of innocent citizens on it," Davis said, speaking on the steps of the Houses of Parliament.

He said the government's attempts to increase from 28 to 42 days the amount of time police have to hold terrorists without charge is the "most salient example of the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedom".