TORY platitudes on civil liberties are of no use when the government is sanctioning the surveillance of workers, Labour said yesterday as Theresa May unveiled plans to compel communications firms to help spies hack phones.

The Investigatory Powers Bill, dubbed the “snoopers’ charter,” will require internet providers to store records of people’s web and social media use for up to a year.

Home Secretary Ms May said the blueprint would leave “no area of cyberspace which is a haven for those who seek to harm us to plot, poison minds and peddle hatred under the radar.”

She won praise from her Labour opposite number Andy Burnham for introducing extra safeguards to protect the civil liberties of the public — including a “double lock” approval system for surveillance requests, where judges can veto warrants signed off by ministers.

But hero US whistleblower spy Edward Snowden said the new law “legitimises mass surveillance.”

“It is the most intrusive and least accountable surveillance regime in the West,” he said. “[The] snoopers’ charter does not require individualised judicial authorisation in advance of interception. Such a dragnet is mass surveillance.”

Mr Burnham warned of “fears in some communities, particularly the Muslim community, that the powers will be used against them disproportionately.”

And he warned: “We have seen in the past how police powers have been wrongly used against trade unionists.

“The government are legislating in the Trade Union Bill to impose new requirements on trade unionists in respect of the use of social media and on the monitoring of it by the police.

“As [Tory MP] David Davis said, this isn’t Franco’s Britain. Can the Home Secretary see that to continue to build on the trust she has created and the good start that she has made today, the government should drop some of its more divisive rhetoric and measures, starting with the measures in the Trade Union Bill?”

Mr Burnham’s comments came as the Pitchford inquiry into undercover policing, commissioned by Ms May in March, reconvened for a further preliminary hearing. “Core participants” including blacklisted workers and women who were targeted by undercover officers via sexual relationships were granted the right to be represented by lawyers of their own choosing.

Taxpayers are set to fork out a whopping £247 million for the Bill’s implementation.