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Fighting Big Brother
EURSOC has argued for some time that the British government has been equipping itself with the means to create a police state. The removal of ancient freedoms, the unprecedented level and surveillance and the introduction of new forms of hate speech laws may not, taken individually, plunge us into a 1984 nightmare. The current government under Gordon "McBean" Brown is more clownish than sinister. However, since worrying systems of control and thought crimes have been put into place, it is increasingly possible for some future leader to "flick the switch"
On Friday, the Guardian's Polly Toynbee dismissed such fears. Worries about a nascent police state are, she wrote, "fashionable because it allows the middle classes to pretend to be victims, too. But it is decadence for mainly privileged people to obsess over imaginary Big Brother attacks on themselves, when others all around them are suffering badly from neglect by the state - or sometimes from real aggression by government. Indignation is precious, not to be squandered on illusory threats, but saved for real injustices."
Her post is a criticism of her Guardian colleague Henry Porter, who has listed ways in which the current government has chipped away at liberties.
"Porter view turns the state into public enemy number one. That is the traditional rightwing view, but many on the left who should know better are buying into this creed of individualism against the collective. The left can't resist also being victims: oh, to be arrested for a cause! Labour has played into their hands with cavalier curtailments of civil liberties for illusory political gains. But the left should beware the old rightwing wolf dressed in civil liberties sheep's clothing that pursues individual freedoms for the powerful at the expense of collective freedoms for all."
"This is the same mindset that sees taxes as an infringement of liberty and an Englishmen's property as his inalienable untaxed castle to hand down, untaxed, to his children. It is the mindset in which the right to choose "personalised" services trumps everyone else's fair chance for best schools and hospitals. Liberty and equality will always rub along together awkwardly. But social democrats should guard against the individualistic my-rights culture of our times that simply ignores the rights of those whose needs are most urgent, in favour of often relatively frivolous paranoia about an overmighty state."
"Frivolous paranoia", then, is the accusation from one of New Labour's most outspoken cheerleaders. If you're worried about the government's creeping surveillance state, you're just another Daily Mail reading rightwinger who is exploiting traditionally leftist fears of fascism to make a case for avoiding taxes. And deserves to be embraced more closely to the bosom of the Nanny State (ie, taxed more) as punishment.
Happily, the Guardian's sister paper, the Observer gave Porter the right to reply.
"(Toynbee's) first ploy was to muddy the waters by questioning what is a reasonable freedom. For instance, she presents Labour's campaign against free speech as merely anti-discrimination laws, which is nothing like the whole truth. There is, she says, a clash between the right to free speech and the right not to be abused. The point is abuse is the corollary of free speech. I would prefer everyone to be well-mannered and respectful yet I believe gays have the right to be rude about the church and the church to be rude about gays, without either running to the law.
"Next step is for her to practise this free speech by referring to what she calls my paranoia. That's fine by me but I'd just point out that there is a difference between fear and paranoia, as there is between sounding the alarm and being alarmist. And again, it's not as if I, or any of the other contributors to the debate, are making this up. It is irrefutably all there in Labour's record.
"The breathtaking dishonesty of her argument is to describe anyone who opposes Labour on these grounds as a being a right-winger. In our democracy liberals exist in all parties - thank God - and it is eloquent of her desperation that she seeks to portray those who stand for liberty, rights and privacy as being individualists who are seeking the aura of victimhood, which of course decrypts as privileged middle-class dilettantes. The allegation comes from the hard-line sectarian communists of my student days, and it is hardly surprising to find the same generation still at it in New Labour, yet now adding notes of vanity, self-righteousness and priggishness. (our italics).
He concludes:
"If you agree with the following propositions you may just find yourself on the opposite side to (government minister Jack) Straw and Toynbee:
"That government exists to serve and respect the people and can only do so by trusting the people; that every individual has the right to privacy and that personal information is exactly that - personal; that every individual has a right to justice - access to proper representation, to know the evidence against them, and be punished only if a normal court of law has decided the law has been broken; that every individual has the right to communicate, move about, assemble and express him or herself without the state obstructing, interfering with or monitoring those activities; that government and the state are not the same thing; that good government is only possible when these liberties are respected and government is fully accountable to the people."
