Is Britain on the Slippery Slope to Dictatorship?
June 26th, 2008Falling headfirst into the abyss would be more accurate.
Via: Guardian:
Aesthetically, at any rate, it does feel as if some of our science fiction dystopias are gradually coming true. In an estate near me, George Orwell’s CCTV cameras are actually trained on the residents’ doors and driveways. Ray Bradbury’s wall-sized TVs flicker in small living rooms. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New Labour government pushes through a bill allowing experimentation on embryos and all British citizens will have to carry an expensive ID card with biometric information on it linked in to humming computer databases in anonymous buildings.
There was something extremely familiar to me about this week’s events. The way they closed down the whole of Whitehall for George Bush’s visit reminded me of how, in Havana, they close the main highway every time Fidel Castro crosses from one side of town to the other.
There was also something unpleasant about the way many in the BBC turned the discussion away from the loss of civil liberties in Britain and instead began to present David Davis as an egotistical oddball, pulling a clever stunt simply to spite the leader of his party. Soviet TV attacked dissidents in the same way. This kind of media character assassination is even more reprehensible because once you destroy a politician’s reputation, you might as well put him down – like a racehorse with a broken leg.
And then, while Labour berates African nations for not adopting Tony Blair’s gold standard for liberal interventionism, Labour itself avoids holding the referendum on Europe it promised.
One gets the feeling that the current crop of neo-monetarist technocrats in power in Britain regard see the whole democratic processes as an irritating stunt, not just David Davis’s upcoming by-election. Certainly Labour politicians show very little respect for the electorate. Any appeal over their heads to the willful and ignorant population probably feels like insufferable interference to them.
So this is the thing. If I, as a citizen, and people like me, don’t agree with the way we are being governed, where do we go to withdraw our consent to be governed? I don’t want to simply switch to the Tories or Liberal Democrats, I want a new contract with my state as a citizen, one that respects my civil liberties.
