Paranoia: The Census 2011, the Police State and Big Brother

"Comrades, fill in your census forms, or it's off to Siberia!"

For the first time in donkeys years I'm not a member of a political party, and I find it very liberating. It has given me an opportunity to reassess things, membership of any party inevitably involves compromise and a responsibility to reluctantly toe the line on some issues. Having said that I will still vote for the Libertarian Party if I have a candidate, apart from the May elections which I am boycotting because of the latest foreign adventure into Libya.

What has disappointed me in recent weeks is the attitude of certain groups I have supported for a long time to the 2011 Census. I think it's a waste of time and money, especially as various parts of the state already have more information about us on numerous databases and I've blogged about this before. To be honest I found the census questionnaire less intrusive than the average job application.

But two organisations have especially disappointed me, NO2ID and Big Brother Watch. I believe both organisations have a valuable role to play as the state becomes ever more intrusive and authoritarian but, as with any campaign, you have to pick your fights. In the last few days they have both banged on about how census data would/could be accessed by MI5. That signals a level of paranoia that I find disconcerting and would make the average member of the public question their campaigns on other, more serious issues.

Via Twitter I have challenged both outfits to point out what on the census form could be of any possible interest to MI5. They have not responded. If you are reading this in the UK you will either have your form ready to complete, or will have already done it. Please, if you agree with NO2ID and Big Brother Watch, let me know, via comments, what you think on the form you would prefer MI5 not to know about you. Obviously I wouldn't expect you to divulge personal info, just mention the question or page number that you find horrendously intrusive.

Rather than asking us if we would like to violently overthrow the government, or even if we think that the policing of demos is excessive it merely asks how we get to work and if we are employed or self employed. There you go Miss Moneypenny, no need to get 007 on to me. I'm self employed and drive to work when I work in Manchester. I bet GCHQ are now going through my blog with a fine tooth comb!

At the same time I had a disagreement with Big Brother Watch on Twitter about today's demo in London against the government's half hearted attempt to clear up Labour's financial mess. They had retweeted a comment that somebody knew lots of people who were not going to the demo today because they are terrified of the police. My response, although more polite, was bollocks! More paranoia I'm afraid.

I accept that the police are not perfect, far from it, but anybody who is too scared of the police to go on a demo should really seek help. I suspect my sister and her hubbie will be on the march today. I don't agree with them and wouldn't go on the march myself, but I know they are not a pair of wimps who are easily scared and would certainly not be intimidated from making a stand for what they believe in by a British Bobby.

I found that nonsense especially disagreeable, verging on the obscene, when you look at what is happening in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Zimababwe, Bahrein and elsewhere. I wouldn't like to be depending on a bunch of pansies who are scared of the British police if our backs were really up against the wall, would you?

They make the loony wing of the Eurosceptic movement who refer to the EUSSR sound almost sane.

Big Brother: Still Watching You!

From today's Mail Online:

Hugely controversial ‘Big Brother’ plans to store details of every internet click, email and telephone call that we make are being revived by the Coalition, it emerged last night.


Police, security services and other public bodies would be able to find out which websites a person had visited, and when, where and to whom a text or call was made.

Security officials insist that monitoring communications data is vital in the fight against terrorism and serious organised crime.

I was talking to a fellow history enthusiast yesterday about the sad demise of history teaching in our schools. Inevitably I suppose, the old quote from George Santayana came up: "If we do not learn from the mistakes of history, we are doomed to repeat them." Although I believe the original version was: "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."


The Coalition might do well to remember the above quote in its urge to be progressive. But the electorate might also do well to remember it, especially those who thought in May that voting Conservative or Lib Dem would make a jot of difference. The continued building of a police state in the UK shows that under this government little will change, the state will just creep over our lives at a slightly slower pace. It's always been like that with our current system of electing the big two, and a little bit of the other this time.

Big Brother Watch is well worth visiting on a regular basis if you value our freedoms and liberties.

The Coalition's Big Society

There are two words that seem to be used in every political statement at the moment, and they fill me with dread. They are 'society' and 'community'. They are used, especially by politicians and interfering busybodies, to justify a very dangerous trend, namely passing power down from government.

Don't get me wrong, I do believe that power should be as locally devolved as possible, a large part of the reason I see no point in European Union membershhip for example. But before any power is devolved they should look at what powers can be scrapped completely first. After all, dodgy forms of devolution produce disasters like the Scottish government.

The politically correct will attack you if you make generalisations, especially those such as all French people smell of garlic and all Chinamen wear flipflops, and rightly so, they obviously don't. But when they want to impose their wishes on us they justify their interfering ways by claiming that 'society' would be better for it or that 'communities' would benefit from it. Well I mustn't be part of either because this week I heard a harridan from the anti-motorist group Brake which, incidentally, enjoys the benefits of charitable status while hectoring you and me about how our cars kill children, and her views on improving 'communities' scared me. I do not believe that speed cameras make for 'more liveable communities'. If they did estate agents would pretty soon start putting speed camera locations on property details to attract buyers. No, she was talking bollocks frankly.

The whole problem with Cameron's 'Big Society' is that the state has far too much power and is far too intrusive. Cameron's plans sound to me like they will merely be delegating that power to other, more local people. The problem with that is that local goverment is crammed full of interfering busybodies just wanting to dabble and interfere in their 'communities', and believe me they are extremely dangerous, I saw them when I was a councillor for four years. Yes, there are many good people involved in local politics, but the mad, or plain insane, have an energy that drives them on to more and more activity when the sane are happy to leave people alone.

Like most people, I suspect, I just want to live my life without being constantly mithered by either civil servants or local commissars. Stick your 'Big Society'.

Caroline Flint-Another Deluded Politician

This morning I heard Caroline Flint MP, former Europe Minister, whining about the new government and claiming that DNA databases and CCTV surveillance were actually there to preserve our freedom, not to destroy it. She still doesn't realise that turning Britain into prison island was a large part of the reason Labour lost on May 6th.

I've just found yet another superb article about this on Big Brother Watch.

Well worth a look.

Celebrity Big Brother

If anything typifies the vile cultural wasteland of New Labour's Britain it is surely Big Brother. Pathetic wannabes and z-list celebrities making complete arseholes of themselves but so egotistical they don't even realise that normal people are appalled by them. A bit like Members of Parliament really.

Below is an excellent Toby Young article in the Telegraph which very nicely sums up the dreadful phenomenon of not just Big Brother, but reality TV:

Is this the beginning of the end for reality television? Last night, Channel 4 broadcast the first episode of the final series of Big Brother and it felt like the last gasp of a dying genre. This is the “celebrity” version of the show, but the biggest name the broadcaster could muster was Vinnie Jones, the former Wimbledon footballer, and it reportedly had to cough up half a million pounds to get him. No less than three of the eleven contestants were chosen because they’ve had sex with someone famous – two of them with Katie Price. I had at least heard of them, which is more than can be said for Basshunter, Sisqo and Lady Sovereign – all pop stars, apparently. Watching these “celebrities” wander around the revamped Big Brother House – it looked like it had been decorated with the contest of Donatella Versace’s underwear drawer – didn’t make for particularly gripping television. It was more like a Public Information Film designed to warn people of the dangers of too much plastic surgery.

In fairness to Channel 4, they’ve probably done as well as they could under the circumstances. It isn’t easy to persuade celebrities to appear on reality shows these days. Contrast the above no-hopers with the contestants on the first series of Celebrity Big Brother in 2001: Anthea Turner, Chris Eubank, Claire Sweeney, Jack Dee, Keith Duffy and Vanessa Feltz. Not A-listers perhaps, but at least Davina McCall’s description of them as “household names” wasn’t met with gales of laughter. Back then the contestants weren’t paid anything, either. I know this because I was invited to participate in the 2003 version and when I inquired about the fee was told that all the contestants were expected to do it for “charity”.

The reason proper celebrities are reluctant to appear on reality shows is because they don’t want to risk tarnishing their brands. Celebrity Big Brother has a particularly bad reputation in this regard, with several contestants doing serious harm to their reputations. Examples include Vanessa Feltz, who appeared to suffer some sort of breakdown in the first series, George Galloway, who pranced around in a black leotard in series four, and most notoriously Jade Goody, who was accused of bullying Shilpa Shetty in the controversial fifth series. The upshot is that the only “celebrities” willing to appear on the programme – with a few exceptions – are those desperately trying to kick-start their careers in show business or desperately trying to revive them. In other words, people with little to lose.

It’s easy to be superior about programmes like Celebrity Big Brother but if the producers can persuade people with real careers to take part they can be quite riveting. I was completely transfixed by George Galloway’s car-crash appearance in 2005. Galloway’s mistake was to use old-fashioned, Machiavellian-style realpolitik to try and win the contest — making pacts with the strong, attacking the weak and double-crossing his allies when it was prudent to do so. Such skulduggery is absolutely routine in the Westminster village and not something his peers would condemn him for, at least not in private. But the people who watch reality shows are complete innocents in such matters and in their eyes Galloway must have come across like a text-book villain.

It’s always a mistake to use any of the standard political arts to try and win a reality show. The people who emerge best are those who play a completely straight bat – who are always themselves, no matter who they’re talking to. The strongest asset you can take into an environment like the Big Brother House is a complete lack of guile, which is one of the reasons I turned it down.

I’d hesitate to condemn Galloway for his behaviour in the house – or indeed any contestant on the programme who has lost his or her cool. We’re accustomed from watching fictional drama to assume that true character emerges from conflict, but I’m not sure this is the case on reality shows. The producers of Big Brother devise ever more ingenious ways of pitting the housemates against each other in the sure knowledge that the more cornered they feel, the more likely they are to retreat into their atavistic selves, becoming defensive, short-tempered and, at times, highly aggressive. Seen from the comfort of our armchairs, such behaviour can seem revelatory, but we know from things like the Stanford Prison Experiment that people in these pressure-cookers can quickly lose any sense of perspective. They don’t necessarily become more “real” as the layers of civility are stripped away; rather, they regress further than this and become more animalistic, less human. In the case of George Galloway, we didn’t see the “real” him, so much as the disintegration of his personality. He became a lab rat.

Watching human beings regress can be quite mesmerizing, but reality shows shouldn’t be confused with real drama. We’re not gaining any insight into people’s characters or discovering a truth about them or ourselves or the world we live in. On the contrary, we’re just left with the illusion that we have. Reality shows occupy the space in our culture – specifically, in the television schedules – that should be occupied by well-scripted drama. The triumph of “reality” as a genre in the Noughties is a reflection of people’s loss of confidence in fiction and we are much the poorer for it. For that reason, the fact that this is the last series of Big Brother is a cause of celebration.

Having said that it is a great chance for a reminder of what a twat somebody like George Galloway actually is. If a reminder were needed.

Big Brother Really Is Watching You

I have just come across an organisation that seems to be doing some very good work. Big Brother Watch is researching and exposing the intrusion into our lives, and erosion of our civil liberties, by the state.

Big Brother Watch was founded by the founders of the Taxpayers' Alliance.

The worrying figures given below are taken from this research done by them:

There are currently at least 59,753 CCTV cameras controlled by 418 local authorities in Britain, up from 21,000 in 1999
This equates to 1 council owned CCTV camera for every 1000 people in the country
Portsmouth and Nottinghamshire Councils are in control of the most CCTV cameras with 1,454 each

Residents in the Outer Hebrides are the most watched people in the UK with 8.3 CCTV cameras controlled by the council for every 1000 people. Portsmouth has the second highest number of CCTV cameras per 1000 people with 7.8

The council controlling the highest number of CCTV cameras in Scotland is Fife with 1350 cameras
The council in Wales controlling the highest number of CCTV cameras is Swansea with 326 cameras
The council controlling the highest number of CCTV cameras in Northern Ireland is Belfast with 400 cameras
The total number of CCTV cameras controlled by councils in London is 8,815, which equals 1.3 CCTV cameras for every 1000 people living in the capital. Wandsworth is the most watched borough in London with 1113 CCTV cameras, or 4.3 cameras for every 1000 residents

In recent months I've become weary of meeting foreigners who comment on how intrusive the British state is, citing the worrying numbers of CCTV cameras spying on the public. It has been commented on by Americans, Australians and most recently by a Belgian, well a Fleming actually.

Make no mistake, Big Brother really is watching you.