Henry Porter is as usual on fine form today. He comments on the 53 items story I mentioned the other day.
Welcome to Fortress Britain, a fortress that will keep people in as well as out. Welcome to a state that requires you to answer 53 questions before you’re allowed to take a day trip to Calais. Welcome to a country where you will be stopped, scanned and searched at any of 250 railways stations, filmed at every turn, barked at by a police force whose behaviour has given rise to a doubling in complaints concerning abuse and assaults.
This reads so much like a science fiction novel depicting some dark, totalitarian future. Yet here we are, with a paranoid government in power using fear to exert that power. And, all too frequently the “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” brigade are willingly trading their freedoms for more apparent security, foolishly failing to realise that this is a course of action destined to reduce both. No, this is not science fiction, this is Britain today:
Three years ago, this would have seemed hysterical and Home Office ministers would have been writing letters of complaint. But it is a measure of how fast and how far things have gone that it does nothing more than describe the facts as announced last week.
Only a few have voiced concern. Where are the headlines shouting from the rooftops? Why is liberty dying with barely a whimper? Why are Britons, so willing little more than half a century ago to trade their lives for liberty so ready to hand it over to a bunch of power crazed, corrupt politicians today?
We now accept with apparent equanimity that the state has the right to demand to know, among other things, how your ticket has been paid for, the billing address of any card used, your travel itinerary and route, your email address, details of whether your travel arrangements are flexible, the history of changes to your travel plans plus any biographical information the state deems to be of interest or anything the ticket agent considers to be of interest.
I don’t accept this and they don’t have the right to know. The worry, of course, is blackmail – give over our private information for them to use and abuse as they see fit or don’t travel. Whatever happened to freedom of movement? The state has no right whatsoever to know where and when law abiding citizens travel. Only a totalitarian would conceive it otherwise.
Those failing to provide satisfactory answers will not be allowed to travel and then it will come to us with a leaden regret that we have in practice entered the era of the exit visa, a time when we must ask permission from a security bureaucrat who insists on further and better particulars in the biographical section of the form. Ten, 15 or more years on, we will be resigned to the idea that the state decides whether we travel or not.
This, in all probability, is what it will take before the masses sit up and take notice. While the draconian behaviour of the state and its quest to eradicate our liberties is affecting “other people” the silent majority remain hard of thinking and simply accept the “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” mantra, before getting on with their daily existence.
How have we allowed this rolling putsch against our freedom? Where are the principled voices from left and right, the outrage of playwrights and novelists, the sit-ins, the marches, the swelling public anger? We have become a nation that tolerates a diabetic patient collapsed in a coma being tasered by police, the jailing of a silly young woman for writing her jihadist fantasies in verse and an illegal killing by police that was prosecuted under health and safety laws.
Where indeed? Porter seems to be a lone voice in the wilderness. To the majority, those of us who voice dissent are weird or paranoid. We are neither. Twentieth century history is an object lesson about what can happen when the state seizes power from its citizens, when it craves access to minutiae about each and every one of them. For information is power and fear is the bedrock on which that power base is built. Gordon Brown my not be Joseph Stalin, but he is sure as hell working from the same handbook.
Fuck them,go by bike,car or motor bike if in doubt lie to the fuckers, they lie to us.
I presume the answer “None of your fucking business” 53 times will not be acceptable?
In which case at least the fishermen will have something to do once the cod run out…
Not to mention those private pilots who need to make a few bob to keep flying…
Can anyone advise on where to flee to? Carribbean France (Guadeloupe; Martinique) looks very tempting.
Well, I’ll be heading for France. Although they are still subject to the EU and its despotic behaviour, the French are more inclined to declare Non! when they feel that their politicians have over stepped the mark. They also, generally, have a healthy disrespect for politicians, so I’ll fit in just fine 😉
French is easy to learn then, one assumes? (I really must look into learning a foreign language…)
I wouldn’t say “easy”. But it is logical – having Latin roots and a large common vocabulary with English.