Monday, February 9

Orwellian Britain

.
When one looks around you at the state of our economy, consider the falling standards in our education system, think back to the money poured into unreformed public services that has wasted or even weigh up the consequences of the approaching energy gap time bomb, one could be forgiven for wondering if our dear Government is capable of doing anything well.
.
But the fact is there are some things this Government does well. There are some things this Government does very well indeed. The problem is nearly all of them concern measures that are designed to restrict our individual freedoms, infringe our civil liberties, invade our privacy and ever more closely monitor all our activities.
.
The latest example of the United Kingdom's transformation into a surveillance state is reported upon in The Sunday Times, as it is confirmed that:

The Government is building a secret database to track and hold the international travel records of all 60m Britons.
The intelligence centre will soon store names, addresses, telephone numbers, seat reservations, travel itineraries and credit card details for all 250m passenger movements in and out of the UK each year all (wrongly) in the name our safety; supposed ant-terrorist measures.

The population of the United Kingdom is supposed to enjoy the right to go about its lawful business unmolested by the state. However the Government is clearly now determined to turn that inviolable protection on its head and do all it can to molest innocent and law abiding people - but to do so remotely, using technology so as to give people the illusion that they still enjoy privacy. It is a concerted assault on two of the principles of a free society - individual freedom and limited government.
.
This burgeoning surveillance state is utterly determined to log every place we go, the services we use, the money we earn, the people we associate with and even how we spend our leisure time. It is turning our legal status of innocence until proven guilty on its head.
.
As the House of Lords Constitution Committee made clear just last week, this country's traditions of privacy and democracy are under threat from pervasive and routine electronic spying and the mass collection of personal information.
.
The people of the United Kingdom are now in danger of being considered guilty unless excluded by the bewildering array of overt and covert technological surveillance methods; Orwell's state as predicted in his classic satire '1984' has truly arrived.
.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Absolutely right Peter. Orwell however had the gender of `Big Brother' wrong -perhaps some measure of PC applied then too and it couldn't be raised- the customary, misguided, protective desire of the male towards the `fair sex' would probably have made us disinclined believe what has taken place since: the biblical prophesy of the `Babylonian Whore' comes to mind. God, who could possibly have foreseen the ugly ideology American Feminism are trying to force on the rest of the world.

The sisterhood have made it acceptable to cretinise, demonise and denigrate the male on the sole basis of his gender. While in Britain the Goldsmiths, Huttons, Scotts, etc., have willingly promulgated and prosecuted perverse gender discriminatory laws at the behest of men-hating weirdos like the Harmans, Hewitts, Hodges, et al.

Clearly they've had a long destructive run, aided and abetted by their thought police, both to the public detriment and ironically at public expense- and the damage wrought to the nation is probably already irreparable - it is time we told them enough is enough and re-asserted ourselves.