Yesterday’s article by Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian was yet another timely commentary on the headlong rush that the British state is taking into the extinction of substantive civil liberties for its citizens. To quote just one passage from his article:
I have woken up – late in the day, but better late than never – to the way in which individual liberty, privacy and human rights have been sliced away in Britain, like salami, under New Labour governments that profess to find in liberty the central theme of British history. “Oh, these powers will almost never be used,” they say every time. “Ordinary people have nothing to fear”.
For me, “the innocent have nothing to fear” is the siren song of tyranny. When the innocent hear these words the innocent are strongly advised to head for the hills.
A case in point of the Labour government’s determination to drive state control into every part of our lives was illustrated in another report in the same day’s paper. The government are now proposing, on the grounds of interfering with the activities of ticket touts, the photo ID will be required to get into gigs. Now, cynical old Hector that I am, I don’t see this as part of a strategy to protect music-lovers from the predation of the ticket e-selling trade, but rather part of a concerted programme of actions to reduce the resistance of young people even further to the idea of having to carry, and produce, identification cards for just about anything they might want to do and, hence, reduce the overall civil resistance to ID cards.
Bear in mind that there are some parts of the UK that you can’t now travel to at all using public transport without holding, and producing, photographic identification papers such as a passport or ID card. Surprised? Well, I’m even more surprised that no-one’s made a bloody fuss about it. I’m talking about travel to the Orkneys and Shetlands where you can’t even board the internal ferry, which is state-owned, without producing a passport. And bear in mind that the arm of the state which owns the ferry services is the Scottish Government who have publicly and very strongly vowed never to predicate the delivery of public services in Scotland upon the possession or production of ID cards. No doubt this is all about “maritime security”, but no-one ever checks what’s being driven onto the car decks of ferries – that’s too difficult – but it’s easy enough to use the spectre of terrorism yet again to lower the resistance of the population to the idea of having to hold and produce ID cards even to exercise the simple liberty of freedom of movement within the state.
You can be sure that these measures will have been agreed at an inter-governmental level between states and based on European directives or regulations. It is still the imposition of law without democratic control on the convention that the Royal Prerogative permits the making and agreement of treaties without the intervention of the Houses of Parliament. Another way of saying, what America wants from its allies, America gets.
I predict that the last open border, that between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, will be closed to those who don’t carry ID cards or passports within the next year. It will then be too late to leave.
It is for these, and many other reasons, that I am now standing up to be counted. This is why I’m attending the Convention on Modern Liberty on the 28th and why anyone who cares at all about their future in the UK needs to think seriously about these issues and decide for themselves whether to stand up now or lie down later.
Pat the Chooks 