Britain is slithering down the road towards a police state

[seafan]

Britain is slithering down the road towards a police state

UK Guardian
Simon Jenkins
February 6, 2008

The machine is out of control. Personal surveillance in Britain is so extensive that no democratic oversight is remotely plausible. Some 800 organisations, including the police, the revenue, local and central government, demanded (and almost always got) 253,000 intrusions on citizen privacy in the last recorded year, 2006. This is way beyond that of any other country in the free world.

The Sadiq Khan affair has killed stone dead the thesis, beloved of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, that any accretion of power to the state is sustainable because ministers are in control. Whether this applies to phone tapping, bugging devices, ID cards, NHS records, childcare computer systems, video surveillance or detention without trial, it is simply a lie. Nobody can control this torrent of intrusion. Nobody can oversee a burst dam.
Khan, an MP and government whip, was allegedly targeted by the police for having been a "civil rights lawyer" and thus a nuisance, though the recording of his meetings with a constituent in prison was supposedly directed at the inmate. 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.

Security machismo claims that in the "age of terrorism", real men bug everyone and everything.

.....

The grim reality of the past week alone is that it has seen a substantial section of the British establishment allowing itself to believe that private dealings between lawyer and client, and between MP and constituent, should no longer be considered immune from state surveillance. A cardinal principle of a free democracy is thus coolly abandoned. It is not a victory for national security. It is a victory for terrorism.

The monitoring organisation Privacy International now gives Britain the worst record in Europe for such intrusion, indeed the worst among the so-called democratic world and on a par with "endemic surveillance societies", such as Russia and Singapore.

.....

A quarter of a million surveillances in Britain are beyond all power of politicians or overseers to check. It is state paranoia, justified only by that catch-all, the "war on terror". In truth it is not countering terror, but promoting it. Mass surveillances one of the poisons that the terrorist seeks to inject into the veins of civil society. ..... Of course there are people who want to explode bombs in Britain. Taxpayers spend a fortune trying to stop them. But how often must we remind ourselves that the bomber need not kill to achieve his end when we appease his yearning for the martyrdom of repression? The amount of surveillance in Britain is grotesque. It is a sign of the corruption of power, and nothing else.

The far-reaching, malignant legacy of George W. Bush's War On Terror is, so far, unchecked.


When will it be enough?

[gateley]

1. As are we.

:(

[katty]

2. this has been growing in UK and here...my UK friends left

London recently, (I haven't been there in a few yrs)they said it is big bro there - and u.s. is doing this as well - there is more country to cover in the u.s., so it may 'appear' to be slower.

[MadHound]

3. Yep, and it is happening here too

Except here, much of the police state is now in the hands of corporations, who then receive our tax dollars from our government in order to turn over their information on us.

Meanwhile, people keep buying into it, purchasing their own scanning devices, cell phones, OnStar, wireless gadgets of all descriptions, all of which can, and are used to track people where ever they go.

Meanwhile cameras are a ubiquitous part of the urban landscape, it has gotten to the point that one can hardly walk outside without being caught on tape somewhere.

This is one reason that I rarely carry my cell phone, and live out in the country. That way I've at least got some confidence that I'm a bit off the radar out here.

[The2ndWheel]

4. Not something you can really blame Bush's war for

The fundamentals for a surveillance society are at least centuries old. It's built into mass society. It's part of how this whole thing can function on a daily basis. It's not called the Information Age because we can look up a few facts in virtual reality. It's called the Information Age because the two dominant institutions of our day, corporations and governments, increasingly own you. They own more of life in general. This is an issue far bigger than the legacy of Bush's war. Has that war on terror furthered the trend? No question. However, it didn't start on 9/11, and it's not going to end in January of 2009.

[Tesha]

5. And when Norsefire runs MP candidates...

[burythehatchet]

6. It's odd that in films depicting a futuristic fascist state, the setting is often England nt

[I work for workers]

7. There are 30 something security cameras within 200 yards of Orwells house.

The irony is almost too much.

[intaglio]

8. K&R

And we don't have anyone with real power opposing it