Complacent Assumptions

Photo by John Harris

A colleague at work, an utterly disillusioned member of the Labour party no-less, said that the reason he opposes the extension of the data-base state is because there is no reason to believe that the state is, or will remain, fundamentally benign.

In other words, those who basically believe that 'those who have done nothing wrong have nothing to fear', and therefore are quite happy for the state to keep the entire population's DNA, movements and most intimate personal information on file, at best naive and at worst complacent in their attitude to the state.

In states with a more critical sense of self-awareness, usually as a result of a conscious effort on the part of society to 'never forget' the experience of a previous tyranny, such as with constitutionalism of United States or post-communist Germany, the polity has a more instinctive aversion to going back down the road of a surveillance state.

The police states of the past didn't have the technology that Britain is now employing to track, weigh and measure the movements, actions and thoughts of its own citizenry. If they had, then its possible that those regime would never have been successfully undermined from within and therefore would still be with us.

Supporters of the Government would claim that the British state is benign, and that it only claims these extensive powers in order to protect us from terrorism, or to protect the children etc. It should be remembered that authoritarian, including fascist and communist, regimes of the past have similarly claimed that their exercise of power was for the greater good of the people.

The British state isn't East Germany yet, though its technological and legal capability to monitor the everyday lives of its citizens has already long-since over-taken the capabilities of that pre-internet state. The British state, for those who do not have 'radical' political beliefs (such as being actively anti-war) or do not have offending aspects to their sexualities (an interest in sadomasochism for example), and are otherwise uninterested in voicing opposition to the state through word or deed, are quite safe.

However, the same could be said of the average, a-political, citizenry of even the most oppressive authoritarian regimes - in Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Stalin's Russia, if you kept your head down, then you would probably be left alone. In today's Britain it is a crime to protest within a mile of parliament without a license from the state, while the police maintain a database on political dissidents who dare to attend protests against the actions of the state.

Even before the current, technology and hysteria driven, onslaught against civil liberties, the British Government of the 1980s suspended any recognisable concept of justice or the rule of law and employed the police to beat up and detain striking miners, with the British courts unthinkingly turning striking miners into political prisoners on the basis of trumped-up charges.

It's hackneyed, but its true to say, that tyranny comes about bit-by-bit. One day they may come for you, or yours.