Prize Chumps

According to David Aaranovitch, believe it or not, Big Brother is your friend.

There is a constant fume about the Big Brother State, enveloping everything from safety cameras on station concourses, through parking wardens, road pricing and licence-plate recognition, to spying on school catchment cheats and fly-tippers. A little of it is true, more of it is hysterical.

Hysterical, eh? Tell that to those who have fallen victim to officious little council jobsworths using RIPA to spy on them in case they are lying in order to get their child into the school of choice – and even if they are lying, the response is disproportionate.

This anger manifested itself in the recent Watford hysteria, which began when it was reported that the council had banned parents from staying with their children at local playgrounds, and had insisted that play rangers would do the job. Some of the grandest libertarian thunderers in the land called down the wrath of their freedom-loving God on these new Labour (sorry, Nu-Labour) dupes, and invited their readers to dream up punishments for the councillors.

yeah, so?

In fact, the real story concerned just two drop-off adventure play areas, where parents had taken to hanging around and were being asked (by the Liberal Democrat council) to desist.

The council has no damned business asking them to desist. The council is there to serve the local community, not boss it about. Playgrounds are open, shared spaces and if parents want to “hang around” then having paid their council tax, they have every right to do just that. So, frankly, the libertarian thunderers are quite right and Aaranovitch is typical of the type of journalist who cozies up to the political establishment.

But this fashionable paranoia about data and surveillance goes well beyond annoyance at petty officaldom, and has become something of a mindset, as we will be reminded later today.

Ah, yes… point out that the state has, indeed, sought to encroach ever more into our daily lives, seek to hold ever more personal information on its databases and you are mentally ill.

Aaranovitch then goes on to lambast the authors of the Rowntree Trust’s report:

Four of the six authors of the report were almost better described as parti pris campaigners than experts. I focused on the DNA database argument because I was familar with it. In fact, the most scathing criticisms in the Rowntree report were of the children’s databases, ContactPoint, eCAF and Onset, which, among other things, have been designed and piloted to help to give support to vulnerable children.

What I hadn’t noticed is that one of the report’s authors, Terri Dowty, self-described as a “musician and author” and editor of a book promoting home education, is a long-term campaigner against ASBOs, and any action that she sees as stigmatising certain young people. To that end she was the leading light in a children’s rights group called Arch, which concentrates on the threat to children from the State.

Yes? And? So? This does not undermine what Terri has to say, now does it? Or is Aaranovitch merely indulging in an ad hominem? Yup, that’s about the sum of it.

Three years before the Rowntree report she and another co-author had addressed an LSE conference on “Children: Over Surveilled. Under Protected”. Before the conference she was quoted as asking: “Who is bringing children up? Are parents effectively nannies for the State’s children?” All in all, one feels, it was just another brick in the wall.

Ms Dowty also co-authored a report on children’s databases, Safety and Privacy, for the Information Commissioner, in 2007. Ms Dowty, like her co-authors, will be, I am sure, committed and intelligent. But by no stretch of the imagination could she be called a dispassionate expert.

Well Aaranovitch certainly isn’t…

None of this alters the fact that what Terri Dowty and her co authors are saying is measurably true – children are being over surveilled, the government is building a database state, big brother is not our friend and Aaranovitch is a chump (Terri didn’t say that; I did).

Talking of prize chumps…

Ian Blair resurfaces with some totalitarian wittering.

“Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both,” said Benjamin Franklin. Nearly a century later, Abraham Lincoln would disagree: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” That essential conflict remains alive today.

Well, I suppose if you are going to write totalitarian tripe, you might as well start as you mean to go on. I’m not convinced that Lincoln was referring to Franklin – and if he was, he would have been wrong as Franklin’s comment remains true to this day.

Blair is arguing that the police voice should be heard on matters of security. Well, yes, why not? But that doesn’t mean that we should take notice of it – not least when it is the tired old “the bogeymen are out to get us” nonsense as an excuse to ramp down on civil liberties.

Blair then blathers on about Al-Qaida. Remember them? oh, yes, a group that doesn’t actually exist as an organisation. Rather the ideology exists as disparate cells – some of which managed to score a hit. And, remind me, how many atrocities has this so-called group actually pulled off? And this justifies treating all British citizens as suspects to be harassed by Blair’s (ex)rent a mob – according to Blair.

So the question is whether, echoing Lincoln, “our case is new”. If it is, then it may be better to risk being at the mercy of the state than at the mercy of the murderously inclined.

Bollocks. I’ll take the latter – every time. The risk to each of us is small. The risk to each of us by a totalitarian state is greater by far as we see our liberties eroded by grasping demagogues – all for our own good of course. Thanks but no thanks; give me the jungle in preference to the gilded cage every time. Sooner the risks posed by a handful of incompetent extremists than the overbearing machinery of the state.

We proposed an equivalent of the system of “investigative detention” used in Europe…

Is it just me or does that send a chill down the spine? The generation that fought Nazi Germany has been betrayed by men like Ian Blair.

So, on balance; sure, the police should be allowed to have their say – and likewise we should be able to tell them to piss off and return to the Peelian principles of policing.