Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Tony Blair's shameful record on civil liberties.

Tony Blair's shameful record on civil liberties.
Brendan O'Neill | May 17, 2007
In a teary-eyed press conference, more becoming of an emotionally
incontinent Hollywood starlet who has won an Oscar than a prime minister
who has been in power for 10 years, Tony Blair announced last week that he
will pack his bags and leave Downing Street on 27 June.
For a libertarian like me, his resignation cannot come a moment too soon.
Leave aside Iraq; forget for a moment the accusations that he was a modern
Machiavelli. Blair’s true legacy is the wholesale erosion of freedom in
Britain.
Blair’s New Labour party transformed Britain into an open prison.
Virtually no area of life is free from the party’s prying eyes and
super-nannyism. Prior to the party’s victory in the General Election in
1997 you could walk through your local town or city without worrying about
being filmed by the authorities. You could pop into a local pub for a
relaxing drink and a smoke, pubs having long been considered a haven from
the pressures of everyday life. At the weekend you could unwind by
cheering on your favourite football team in one of Britain’s many soccer
stadiums.
No longer. Everyday life has now been colonized by the Blairites.
When New Labour came to power there were a few thousand CCTV cameras in
the UK. Today there are five million. That’s one spycam for every 12
citizens. Britain has more than 20 per cent of the world’s CCTV cameras,
which, considering that our tiny island occupies just 0.2 per cent of the
world’s inhabitable landmass, is a quite remarkable achievement. The
average Londoner going about his or her business should expect to be
picked up on 300 CCTV cameras a day.
The cameras are getting cleverer all the time. Some cams come with
automatic number-plate recognition, facial recognition and even suspicious
behaviour recognition—that is, internal software which analyses clusters
and movements of pixels in CCTV footage in search of “behavioral
oddities.” British scientists, backed by a £500,000 government grant, are
currently developing cameras with “gait recognition.” These will recognise
whether people are walking suspiciously and then alert a human operator.
Think of it as a Ministry of Unfunny Walks.
The government recently introduced speaking CCTV cameras. In April,
Blair’s home secretary, John Reid, announced that the government would
spend close to £1 million on fitting loudspeakers on to cameras in 20
areas around Britain. Faceless operators based in CCTV bunkers will use
microphones to bark orders at those of us who litter or loiter or commit
crimes.
Worse, government officials are recruiting children to provide the voices
for these new cams when they “go live” later this month. A competition has
been launched in schools to find well-behaved and “socially conscious”
children who will be co-opted by the government to “remind adults to act
responsibly on our streets,” as a Home Office press release put it.
Turning children into instruments of government policy is reminiscent of
totalitarian regimes. Indeed, by coating Britain with cameras and
effectively recruiting child spies, the Blairites have gone some way to
making George Orwell’s dystopian nightmare of 1984 a reality. Winston
Smith was tormented by the telescreen which monitored his every movement
and also spoke to him; he hated the “horrible children” who spied on
everyone, and the fact that “it was almost normal for people over 30 to be
frightened of their own children.” When sanctimonious 12-year-olds start
telling off we Britons over loudspeakers later this month, I think we’ll
know how Smith felt.
The Blairites have taken over our pubs, too. Public houses were
traditionally free from the restraints and regulations of everyday life.
In pubs you could smoke, get drunk, shout, swear and flirt with members of
the opposite sex (or the same sex). Not anymore. New Labour has
transformed the British pub into another outlet for its hectoring nannyism.
As of July 1, smoking will be banned in all pubs, clubs and workplaces
across England. The smoky drinking den will be a thing of history. Around
the country pub toilets are now plastered with public health posters
warning of the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases, drug-taking and
the overconsumption of alcohol.
The government’s Department of Health, for example, has put up obnoxious
anti-smoking posters in pubs. In women’s toilets the posters say: “If you
smoke, you stink.” In men’s toilets the posters focus on—what
else?—penises. With a picture of a man’s legs with a limp cigarette where
his penis should be, one poster says: “Bad news: smoking causes impotence.
More bad news: these ads are in the ladies’ toilets, too.” That poster in
particular sums up the killjoy, contemptible nature of the New Labour
government: it both lectures smokers and sneeringly promises to ruin their
chances of getting laid at the end of the night. Even beermats now have
government messages printed on them, covering everything from domestic
violence (don’t do it) to cancer (be aware of it).
Soccer stadiums, too, have been invaded by the beak-nosed Blairites.
Hundreds of thousands of men (and some women) head to stadiums every
Saturday to cheer their team—and the government looks upon these mass
gatherings as an opportunity for mass social engineering.
In 2005 officials kickstarted the “Football and Health” initiative, which
is aimed at “harnessing the mass appeal [of football] to help reinforce
and promote healthy living.” “Football is an important part of many
people’s lives, [so] it provides great opportunities to get across key
messages about healthy, active lives,” said one government minister.
Football fans are now bombarded with leaflets about sexual health, the
dangers of smoking, how much fruit they should eat, and how to check their
testicles for strange lumps and bumps. A stress-free fun day at the
footie? Forget about it.
The Blairites have carried out increasingly crazy experiments for how to
deal with errant youth. The flipside of the government’s recruitment of
children to lecture adults has been its demonization of young people as a
threat to the nation. In an effort to disperse groups of youth gathering
at bus-stops or on park benches, some local authorities have installed an
“anti-youth gadget” called the Mosquito which emits a noise that is
unbearably high-pitched to people under the age of 20 (but which sounds
like a faint buzz to the rest of us). Other local authorities prefer the
“Manilow method”: they publicly play easy listening music, including Barry
Manilow, in an effort to force youth to return home.
These schemes are part of the government’s drive against “anti-social
behaviour.” New Labour introduced Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) in
1999, written decrees which tell individuals how they must behave. A local
authority can issue an ASBO forbidding an individual from walking down a
certain street, using bad language in public or even wearing a certain
item of clothing, without having to prove in a court of law that the
individual is guilty of anything.
ASBOs are like feudal rulings: they are dished out on the whim of local
officials and on the basis of hearsay rather than hard evidence of
misdemeanor. They’re a shocking affront to liberty and to the rule of law.
So in Blair’s Britain we are spied on constantly; we’re nannied everywhere
from the pub to the soccer stadium; we can be reprimanded and have our
freedom of movement and association restricted on the say-so of a local
official. Dear reader, we Britons are no longer free. Instead we live in a
permanent state of parole, where we must walk, talk and act in a certain
way or risk having our collars felt by a CCTV spy, a cop or a council
official.
That is Blair’s legacy: the transformation of Britain into one big holding
cell, and British citizens into constant objects of suspicion.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked in London. His journalism is collated
at BrendanONeill.net.
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