The Freedom of The Streets
I fear the battle to retain a range of civil liberties may have already been lost. Faced by an ongoing terrorist threat, one that looks likely to last decades, we are bullied into accepting more and more draconian limits upon our liberties, including such basic freedoms as free speech, the right of habeas corpus and peaceful assembly. That most insidious of all Orwellian concepts, thought crime, has now become a chilling reality as people are arrested and locked up not for what they have done but for what they might do, for the things that they have downloaded and read.
Britain has never experienced a period of totalitarian rule; most people view the growing surveillance of every aspect of their lives from government and commercial organisations with benign acquiescence or indifference. For anyone living in any large city now whole swathes of their lives will be lived under the watchful eye of the video camera and for the most part think nothing of it. Soon we will, if the present government gets its way, be required to carry identity cards; these will contain a staggering amount of personal information and are in no way to be compared with the flimsy pieces of cardboard issued during the last war. Whenever objections are raised they are greeted with that tired mantra of every bullying autocrat, if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.
Well I have plenty that I would wish to keep private. Moreover I would posit that anyone who has reached the age of thirty without some part of their lives that they would not prefer to keep private has lived an empty and anaemic existence. Amongst the many woeful aspects of the television obsession with ‘reality’ programmes has been a lack of understanding of the psychological importance of privacy, of the need to preserve intact some part of our lives away from the intrusive glare of others.
So as we sleepwalk towards a policed and controlling society we may be seeing the beginning world in which the concept of private, as in Stalin’s Soviet Union, is began to be seen as synonymous with subversive.
Britain has never experienced a period of totalitarian rule; most people view the growing surveillance of every aspect of their lives from government and commercial organisations with benign acquiescence or indifference. For anyone living in any large city now whole swathes of their lives will be lived under the watchful eye of the video camera and for the most part think nothing of it. Soon we will, if the present government gets its way, be required to carry identity cards; these will contain a staggering amount of personal information and are in no way to be compared with the flimsy pieces of cardboard issued during the last war. Whenever objections are raised they are greeted with that tired mantra of every bullying autocrat, if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.
Well I have plenty that I would wish to keep private. Moreover I would posit that anyone who has reached the age of thirty without some part of their lives that they would not prefer to keep private has lived an empty and anaemic existence. Amongst the many woeful aspects of the television obsession with ‘reality’ programmes has been a lack of understanding of the psychological importance of privacy, of the need to preserve intact some part of our lives away from the intrusive glare of others.
So as we sleepwalk towards a policed and controlling society we may be seeing the beginning world in which the concept of private, as in Stalin’s Soviet Union, is began to be seen as synonymous with subversive.
