The Englishman reminds us of what we already knew, but it’s worth reiterating. Interestingly, it is the Times that now bangs the drum. Finally, the mainstream media is waking up to the reality of modern Britain.
Walk down any high street in Britain today and you will instantly be under surveillance. All around you, lampposts and shopfronts bristle with CCTV cameras, many of them privately operated and unregulated. They are watching you in case you are bent on shoplifting or engaging in violent disorder.
As you pass the Post Office, it is unlikely to occur to you that the Royal Mail’s investigators have the power to mount surveillance or intercept operations if they suspect you of mail theft.
The man on his knees rifling through the pile of rubbish by the kerb is not, as you might have thought, a tramp but a fly-tipping investigator from the town hall. He and the officials in the council offices down the road have the power, should they chose to use it, to recruit informants to spy on fly-tippers, dodgy stallholders and housing benefit cheats.
And the young girl rattling the collection tin on the opposite pavement might well be under surveillance by the Charity Commission’s investigation branch, which doubts the validity of her fundraising activities.
Welcome to Britain in the 21st Century, a picture rather more akin to East Germany in the latter years of the 20th.
Are we really so criminally minded that we need this level of spying? Yes, spying, because that is what it is. Nasty suspicious, petty little authoritarians who despise our traditional freedoms, who build their fiefdoms on the misery they can create for others, who treat us all as suspects. This is not about what is in our best interests, it is the machinery of the state and its minions entrenching themselves, stealing power to dig themselves further in. We, the citizens who employ these people are their targets. We, the innocent, law abiding citizens are deemed guilty until surveillance decides otherwise.
What will it take, I wonder, for the masses to realise what has happened and awake from their slumber? How long must this continue before the Briton takes on the mantle of his illustrious ancestors and fights back, takes what is rightfully his from the grubby little thieves who stole it while he slept? How long must we endure these obsessive, nosy bureaucrats poking about in our personal lives before we cry “enough!”? This country that I once loved has become the Stasi’s wet dream.
And to those who still naively believe that this is all for our benefit and only those who have something to hide have something to fear, another story from the Times offers a cautionary tale:
A pensioner was killed after a couple used a policeman friend to trace him and then attacked his home in a dispute over a supermarket parking space, a jury was told yesterday.
A silly argument over a parking space in Asda that should have gone unremarked led to something rather more sinister:
The former Rolls-Royce worker became a target when he shouted at Zoe Forbes, 26, because she parked her car in a space he had earmarked for himself at a branch of Asda, Nottingham Crown Court was told.
Mrs Forbes was upset and called her husband Mark, who told her to note down Mr Gilbert’s numberplate. He then asked a policeman friend to check Mr Gilbert’s address on the police national computer, using the car registration number.
Mr Forbes sent his wife a text message reading: “We’ll smash his car to bits and then his hire car and then whatever he gets after that until he dies.”
Quite apart from wishing that this nasty couple go down for a long, long time, it seems that you do have something to fear if you upset someone who knows a bent copper.
Nothing to hide, nothing to fear? Do give me a break, please…
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Update: I see that Simon Jenkins is discussing the very same thing in the Groan. It’s a shame he doesn’t appear to understand the Wilson doctrine, though:
Either way, the bugging destroyed the “Wilson doctrine”, that MPs cannot be bugged. It appears that they can if ministers, or the police, so decide.
No, Simon, the Wilson Doctrine always allowed for the surveillance of MPs if there was a sufficient national security justification. What Wilson said was that he would approve it if necessary and at the appropriate time, tell the house. This bugging could feasibly have been within the terms of that doctrine – as it was, it wasn’t, but that’s another matter. Getting such a basic fact wrong undermines what would otherwise have been a good article.
Why can’t so-called professional journalists do even basic fact checking?
Good post — I’m sad that what you say is all true.
Rob’s last blog post..Adam Smith, drink and Nigel Evans
“Are we really so criminally minded that we need this level of spying?”
What actual harm does it do?.
Neil Harding’s last blog post..Glad I Am Not Rowan Williams.
Presumably they didn’t do history in your school. Try reading up on European and Russian history 1917 – 1989.