We endorse a lot of what Helen Brooke writes about in her opinion piece in The Independent newspaper on Thursday 13th October 2005.
Given the planned censorship of the internet under the Terrorism Bill 2005 (more on this later), we will quote the article in full, as published on Heather's Freedom of Information blog Your Right To Know, just in case:
"Has anybody in Britain actually read '1984' ?
The Independent, 13 October 2005
By Heather Brooke"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time." George Orwell, 1984
It seems appropriate that the author of '1984' was a British citizen. George Orwell must have seen how easily the great British public's lamb-like disposition toward its leaders could be exploited to create a police state."
Say what you will about Americans, but one thing they are not is passive. The Bush administration may have pushed through the Patriot Act weeks after September 11th, but as the American public got to grips with how the law was affecting their individual rights, their protests grew loud and angry.
Yesterday saw the publication of the Government's latest Anti-Terror Bill that would give police even more power. The House of Lords, meanwhile, is debating the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill and Whitehall is investigating ways to ban former civil servants from publishing their accounts of what happens inside the corridors of power.
There are already nearly 200 pieces of anti-terrorism legislation. What else can be left except thought-crime? The police and politicians have scented power and they want to run it to ground. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair shamelessly demands more laws even while his department is under investigation for shooting dead an innocent Brazilian and covering up the extent of the botched operation
But never underestimate the British public's lack of interest in serious issues. They may moan and gripe but the most they are likely to do is write a letter to the editor 'Yours outraged, Tunbridge Wells'. Soon enough they will be back gobbling up their junk diet of celebrity piffle. One can almost here the powers-that-be issuing their proclamation to the masses: 'Let them read Heat.'
There was a small letter-to-the-editor uprising when 82-year-old Walter Wolfgang was manhandled out of the Labour Party Conference two weeks ago for daring to say 'nonsense'. But outrage has already faded and will disappear altogether if a celebrity does something interesting, or even slightly boring.
Meanwhile, the public are being banned from protesting within 1km of Parliament. The Serious Crime and Police Powers Act makes it a criminal offence of trespass on a 'designated site' for 'national security' reasons. These terms are not defined, so it's likely we'll see the law used against protestors. Police can also store a person's details, fingerprints and DNA when arrested. You don't have to be found guilty for the police to swab your mouth and keep records on you; simply looking suspicious or being in the wrong place at the wrong time is reason enough as David Mery, who was arrested at Southwark tube station, can attest.
I hopped on a London bus recently and found my face broadcast on both decks. The 15-plus cameras are deemed to make us feel safer. It makes me feel violated. Rather than spying on millions of innocent people, I'd feel safer if the police were more open and accountable and told me, for example, how many officers patrol my neighbourhood or the number of times police fail to show up when called. Failures in police intelligence are caused not by being too open with the public, but from being too secretive.
Across government institutional privacy is protected at all costs, while individual privacy is under assault. Yet the passive faces of my bus companions shows a society so dulled into submission they resemble stunned cows lined up for slaughter. I couldn't help thinking that had I been in America, the people would not stand for this. There would be petitions, leaflets, stickers, protests, maybe even armed violence.
Constant surveillance; files on innocent people, secret trials - these are the hallmarks of a police state, one that is being erected with the meek acceptance of the British public.
Where are the fighters in the UK? Where is the concern that the state is invading every single nook of our privacy? That the police are becoming more politicised and more powerful? That politicians are cloaking themselves in secrecy under the guise of national security for the most ridiculous of reasons.
What should happen is this - we should give no more power to the state without the state giving something to us. If the government wants to keep a database of our identities, then it should publish its entire staff directory so we can see who is doing what at taxpayer expense. If the police want to detain people for longer periods, they must tell us who these people are and what they are accused of doing; they must provide enough evidence to a judge to warrant such internment.
Here's what you can do: find out the name of your MP and write to them in Parliament or send a fax at www.writetothem.com. See what they say on anti-terror laws or on ID cards at www.theyworkforyou.com, attend a local council meeting, start asking questions and demand accountability from all those public bodies who take your money. You could even form a citizens group or donate money to an existing pro-democracy campaign such as Liberty, Justice, Inquest, www.Mysociety.org. The alternative is real life Big Brother with all the grainy grimness of a CCTV photoshoot.
The quotation from George Orwell's '1984' at the start of Heather's article continues:
"You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinised"
- except , of course, that nowadays the surveillance technology can be used to snoop on you even in the dark.
It should be remembered that in '1984', it was only the IngSoc party appartchiki who were under such surveillance, with the vast majority of Plebs, being beneath contempt and not worth the expense. With the reduction in unit costs of surveillance technology, sadly, this is no longer the case, and we are being subjected increasingly to mass surveillance, by the Government and by private industry and commerce.
The chilling effect on the innocent is palpable, yet there is no demonstrable effect on terrorists or serious criminals.
I'm guessing you haven't actually been to America in a while. Most citizens don't even know what the PATRIOT Act is, let alone feel any reason to protest it. There are cameras everywhere. Riders of mass transit are told repeatedly that their bags are subject to random search by the police. Police require everyone to carry ID and produce it on demand. Police brutality is a fact of life, and few even notice it's worth being upset about. The government and corporate spying and intrusion doesn't seem to bother the majority of Americans, who shrug and say, "I guess this is making me safer."
The America you describe in your article is a fantasy.
@ American - it is not our article, it is Heather's.
http://www.yrtk.org/2005/285/#more-285
The so called PATRIOT Act is not as repressive as the hodge podge of supposedly anti-terrorist and other snooping legislation which we have here in the UK, where we do not have a Privacy Law or a written constitution.
Here is a paradoxical situation: We the 'left-wing' or 'nice & clever' citizens, demand on our fellow citizens to take action aginst this onslaught of measures designed to control & monitor us. Even if this happened, anti-terrorist legislation would stop us in our tracks.
If we do take diplomatic action, i.e. an anti-war march in Central London attended by 2 and a half million Brits, petitions, attendance of council meetings, running for election, MP pestering - if we do do all this and yet no answers, no change, and no credence granted to our voice - then what choice do we the people have but violence? It would seem to be the only language our 'diplomats' speak. They will spend millions on suppressing their enemies, yet this figure pales in comparison to the public & private money invested in watching the people, controlling us, and making sure we consume. Even if we are determined to fight this disturbing trend, I'm afraid we have already lost our voices.
If we were to react with violence, smashing the cameras, hacking the networks, pirate homebrew broadcasts, disrupting the order of the state, then we would be criminals. Terrorists. Not heroes, not freedom fighters, especially not revolutionaries. We do not have the luxury of consent any more, and it looks like both violence and due process are not going to change this.
We need to claim back our consent, by insisting upon referendums. I will never forget Bliar addressing the nation after the anti-war march. He just told us to fuck off. Some democracy.
I agree the only voice provided to the individual is an illusional voice created to pacify the easily lead and the weak minded. The only true voice is that of direct and violent action.
@ abc abc - against whom would you aim such
"direct and violent action." ?
dear guys,
i`m jule from germany und today i made my last exams in english( even if i can´t speak english very well^^).
we wrote our test about the article "has anybody in britain actually read "1984"?" by heather brooke (2005).
after we´ve finished, we had a discussion about the article, because some of us wrote, that everything of brooke´s sentences is mean in an ironic way.
i´ve read the translation on your page after the test, but i´m still not sure if i´m right when i say that she really criticizes the police system etc.
am i right?
it would be very nice of you, if you´d tell me sth about this article, because it´s very important to me.
if i had the wrong ideas about the test, i have to do it once again and so i´d like to know if i have to learn the next two weeks again...
thank you,
mfg jule
also eigentlich solltest du dir keine sorgen machen. klar übertreibt sie an der ein oder anderen stelle und natürlich sind einige sätze ironisch gemeint (But never underestimate the British public’s lack [...]) aber im großen und ganzen übt sie ganz einfach kritik am system und am sog. "anti-terror"-kampft, welcher längst dazu ausgenutzt würde, die bevölkerung zu kontrollieren und zu unterdrücken.
die genannten "ironischen" stellen dienen hauptsächlich dazu, ihre reder zu provozieren und somit dazu zu bringen, etwas gegen die jetztige situation zu tun! deshalb benennt sie ja im letzten abschnitt auch einige maßnahmen, die man sofort ergreifen könnte, um druck auf die behörden auszuüben.
@ jp - Heather's article is not being "ironic". She really is astonished and frightened, that the politicians in the UK have been allowed to use George Orwell's novel "1984" as a "how to" policy manual. This is exactly the opposite of the dire warning against a dystopian totalitarian society which the novel was intended to be.
You might want to ask Heather Brooke directly about this article, on her own blog article:
http://www.yrtk.org/2005/285/