Not a day goes by without some new evidence of the government’s creeping - and clumsy – authoritarianism. Fresh concerns over alleged UK collusion in torture, 300 children swabbed onto the DNA database each day, ID cards cloned inside twelve minutes and the revelation that the authorities – including over a hundred councils - try to access to our private phone and email records once every minute. That is just last week.
Still, those who label this government ‘Orwellian’ are not just exaggerating the facts. They are missing the point. Neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown would have dreamt of sending in troops to quell a demonstration, as we saw in Iran. Nor has Labour’s spin machine sunk to the depths of Soviet double-speak – nothing to rival Brezhnev ‘s ‘fraternal internationalist assistance to the Czech people’, as tanks rolled in to smash the Prague Spring of 1968. This government has not annihilated British liberty. It has anesthetised us to a gradual erosion of freedom. We are comatose, not crushed.
If comparisons with dictators and despots are wide of the mark, there remains a faint but familiar resemblance in the way this government has bent the language of freedom out of shape. First, Ministers persistently present a Faustian trade-off between liberty and security. Yet, since 1997, increased detention without charge, ID cards, the most CCTV cameras - and largest DNA database – in the world have delivered precious little security for the liberty sacrificed. The terrorist threat has risen to an all-time high. Violent crime has nearly doubled. It is improbable that torture can deliver reliable intelligence, so allegations of MI5 collusion – which Ministers fail to dispel – are a public relations coup for Al-Qaeda.
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