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The British Inquisition
It's None Of Your Bloody Business!
Britain's surveillance state continues to grow. Earlier this month it was revealed that the government is using anti-terror legislation to instigate 1,000 covert surveillance operations a month.
Not to keep tabs on crazed preachers or fundamentalist groups, mind: These government agents are spying on underage smokers, fly tippers, those who allow their dogs to foul parks and homeowners who improve their houses without planning approval.
Councils are checking email and telephone records, it is reported - the number of surveillance cases launched by local councils has doubled in a year, and on current projections will overtake those launched by police, according to the Telegraph.
One of the worse cases relates to spying on a Poole couple who the council suspected of lying about their address in order to ensure their children found a place at an oversubscribed school.
"The "spies" made copious notes on the movements of the mother and her three children, who they referred to as "targets" as they were trailed on school runs. The snoopers even watched the family home at night to establish where they were sleeping.
"In fact, the 39-year-old mother - who described the snooping as "a grotesque invasion of privacy" - had held lengthy discussions with the council, which assured her that her school application was totally in order.
"Poole borough council disclosed that it had legitimately used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) to spy on the family."
The Telegraph published a Stasi-like report drawn up by council spies listing the family's movements. It make for chilling reading - the everyday life of a British family listed and laid bare for the delight of council officials.
Why are the supposedly "liberal" newspapers like the Guardian and the Independent not covering this?
Where is the BBC coverage of a sinister twist in home affairs which, had it been introduced under a Conservative government, would have been depicted as worse than life in Orwell's 1984?
It beggars belief that anti-terror legislation is being used to target parents; it is difficult to imagine, too, council snoops following an innocent family around reporting on their school runs and shopping trips.
How can the British government expect voters to grant it any new powers of detention, or to order us to carry ID cards? We have been assured repeatedly that illiberal laws which go against this nation's ancient traditions are required only for the "war against terror." Yet this legislation is being used to follow people walking their dogs in parks, or who are suspected of lying in order to avoid having their children go to one of the government's appalling schools?
EURSOC has long maintained that the British government is arming itself with the machinery of a police state. Peter Hitchens agrees: "Lies, unaccountable authority and the seeds of a secret police force – checking today on school catchment areas, and tomorrow on what? One thing's for sure. You'll find out too late."
Where are the human rights lawyers defending these families? We live in a country where the dominant reading of the European Convention on Human Rights demands we give a home to terrorists sworn to kill as many of us as possible - yet no-one from the gilded chambers so dedicated to the protection of killers will step up to argue that ordinary Britons suspected of minor crimes should not be followed day and night by secret police.
And now, they're prying into your sex life. 200,000 British households a year will be quizzed by the Office for National Statistics about their salaries, their methods of contraception, who their former partners were and how long they spent with them.
As one observer noted, people tend to clam up when faced with probing questions from officials; others give the answers they believe their inquisitor wants to hear.
Is the government seriously considering sending thousands of monitors around the country to demand whether or not respondents have had vasectomies or whether they have taken the Morning After Pill?
One hopes for their sakes that the inquisitors wear body armour: Your correspondent can think of numerous Brits who would answer such rude questions with a punch in the face. How can they call on the elderly, who aren't quite as shameless as their younger neighbours, and demand to know such things? And if an inquisitor shows up on the doorstep of a devout Muslim family... will he or she really ask questions about sexual relations?
In the 18th century, an intrepid group of French cartographers set out to map what was then an unknown country. Some remote locals, believing the map-makers to be foreign spies or agents of the King, eager to find new ways of raising taxes, attacked and sometimes killed the newcomers. It's likely that British Inquisitors could end up the same way if they follow this insane scheme.
Why does the government need this information? We'd say that it's because this is the first government in British history that has relied so closely on sociologists and social workers to set policy; the only thing that sociologists can do is gather information, much of it pointless, and use it to back up their (already drawn) conclusions.
It'll never work. No-one trusts this government to keep information private, thanks to a series of disasters when personal details were lost or leaked last year. There's also the danger that the information will be passed on to foreign powers: You might laugh, but it has emerged that the government is prepared to pass details of car ownership and images from speed cameras to the US and EU, once again for "anti-terror" purposes.
As much as everything else, the rise of Britain's surveillance state has made a nonsense of the fight against terror. Who would be willing to grant further powers to the state to combat terrorism, in the knowledge that those same powers could be used against them in future?
