I think I referred to his words before, and I am sure I shall have reason to do so again: David Davis, at the Convention on Modern Liberty, said that if we find ourselves in a police state, it shall have been too late; he also said that the government is slowly accruing to itself all the tools of a police state. Here is another, "courtesy" of
ZDNet:
The UK government is considering the mass surveillance and retention of all user communications on social-networking sites including Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo.Home Office security minister Vernon Coaker said on Monday that the EU Data Retention Directive, under which ISPs must store communications data for 12 months, does not go far enough. Communications such as those on social networking sites and instant messaging could also be monitored, he said.
This Government's approach to the citizen is one of constant suspicion, distrust and paternalism. We cannot be trusted to look after ourselves, and we cannot be allowed to live freely. It is clear that getting rid of Labour is now a necessary condition for the restitution of liberty, but it is by no means a sufficient condition. As Ken Livingstone said in an
interview with Iain Dale,
The tragedy is that everyone below Cabinet level knows that the Permanent Secretary in their department does an annual assessment of their performance and sends it to the Chief Whip. It should be the other way around. They know if they go out on a limb, the civil servants will undermine them. Even if you’re John Prescott and all else fails, they’ll bring the Treasury in, or the lawyers to tell you you can’t do something. We’ve just got to break this. The civil service has its own agenda. In the end most ministers and most prime ministers go native and get sucked in by it.
Getting rid of Labour is necessary, but the job will not be done until the Civil Service, and particularly the Home Office, has its back broken. Does anyone seriously think that the Tories will do a full and proper job with regard to that?
2 comments:
Indeed. It's like I keep saying: ID cards, national databases and what have you were Home Office policy long before they became Labour policy.
Go back to the Major govt, and it was the Tories who were pushing ID cards and Labour opposing them. I suspect that by 2015 the situation will have reversed itself again.
I had never realised that the Major government had looked at ID cards. (I was not even a teenager at the time.) According to Privacy International:
"John Major issued a consultation paper. There was considerable public and Cabinet opposition. The proposal was quietly set aside in 1996." (src)
Back in the days when Cabinet ministers had spines, evidently. One of the problems with our system of government is that a new government inevitably has a core of back-benchers with no parliamentary experience, and there is a danger of having to settle for ministers with no ministerial experience, as well.
So perhaps it will happen that the roles reverse. That said, I do think that Tories have something closer to an instinctive suspicion of big state "solutions" even when looking at problems of crime and disorder. Time will tell, I suppose.
The obvious answer is to vote Lib Dem, but then they are less coherent on other things: for adherents of "social liberalism" they have a strange fascination with being socially-illiberal.
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