Blair and John Reid, his home secretary that is also leaving, are trying to put into place the same law the British government had in Northern Ireland over all of Britain.
In 1972, I was stopped on Oxford Street at 7 pm as I walked calmly towards a Tube station. Two officers in uniform asked me who I was, where I had been and where I was going. They asked me for ID. It happened that I had just got in from Paris and had my passport. They went through it. They asked me to repeat details like my date and place of birth. I was carrying a grip that they searched. They pulled things out and asked me what they were. They wanted full explanations of who I said I was going to see (my dad!). And what was the address again? (Three times that question). They were cold, aggressive, professional, worked as a team, cross-cutting questions. You said you were born in what year again? No, in full, the full date. Your mother's maiden name? (Yes, they asked me that). Spell it. So you came from where? Paris? What were you in Paris for? Do you have any proof you live and work in Paris? Tell me again how you travelled today, you weren't clear about that. And how are you going to that address, what was it again? What Tube are you taking? All right, go.
I was perfectly aware they had no right to do any of this. I also knew I was a long-haired hippie who was going down the station where some dope would be found in his pocket if I didn't cooperate. Later that week, a barrister friend who knew what was going down with respect to the Northern Ireland situation told me I'd been dead right to make that call. "They may have been in uniform, but they were Special Branch," he said.
"wartime"-like powers "to stop and question people." The "draconian" powers will give the police the ability "to interrogate individuals about who they are, where they have been and where they are going."
Of course, all that was under the radar back then. And of course it is intolerable that a Prime Minister should be openly supporting policies of this kind in order to make them "legitimate" and everyday. But I can't help thinking Britain has been on this slope for a very long time.
One of the things that allows our societies to function is selective enforcement of laws and regulations. If all our lives were constantly examined to make sure we are not breaking any rules, life would grind to a halt. But this means is that the choice of which laws to enforce, and who to monitor, is a powerful tool of social control. I am convinced that, if the government were out to "get" anyone, they wouldn't have to wait too long until they commit a traffic violation, fail to meet an administrative deadline, or whatever, and it would be really easy to make their life hell.
In more liberal times, one could hope for public support against such abuses, but Blair's op-ed indicates that the public will accept oppressive selective enforcement or at least that the elite think they can get away with it. Bush is a symptom, not the disease.
For sure, no one looked like they were ready to protest among the passers-by on Oxford Street. As long as the victim is "the Other"...
My legal friend's point was, however, that this was not just a couple of nasty cops stopping a hairy they felt like victimising, but that these were political police out on the anti-terrorist prowl to stop and search (I was carrying a bag). That, if I'd stood my constitutional ground, I'd have gone somewhere worse than the local nick and spent a lot more time there... And that trumped-up charges against me, more serious than possession, were quite possible.
In other words, the "wartime" pretext is already an old one, and the British establishment has never been liberal.
my dad used to say that was so they could pull in anyone anytime if they wanted to, since waking up in the morning was synonymous with breaking some archaic, unenforced law or another.
i have a hunch lao tzu would have something to say about the most lawless countries needing the biggest number of laws to compensate.
i heard a good friend tell once of his visit to his accountant, who pointed to a tall pile of papers on his desk, saying those were just the 'decreti' of that day to decipher.
i'm starting to think people are subconsciously aware of some cataclysmic changes soon to come down, like animals sensing an earthquake or tsunami, and they want an authoritarian government, as that would be the only way to avoid mass breakdown of social systems and the resultant anarchy that may see them victims of angry hooligans.
also in europe it's been a half century since nazism terrified its citizens into becoming complicit mass murderers, and obviously two generations is all it takes to become sheep again, having forgotten the feeling of the jackboot pressing down on their cervical area.
i used to think those holocaust memorial ceremonies were a bit pathetic, modern events have suddenly changed my mind about this.
are we not complicit in the terrorisation of resource-rich indigenous peoples, and shouldn't we remember the evil we invite by giving too much power up to governments?
bah, people are so ignorant and gullible, so easy to make cower with cheap -and expensive- propaganda.
england never had a popular revolution, and the 5% that own 95% of the country have the technology to keep it firmly that way, now with 'terrorism' as the oh-so convenient stepson of 'communism' to use as scapegoat, while whittling away at peoples' freedom to feel free at all.
it is the excesses of no-holds-barred capitalism which has produced the extreme reactions of communism and islamic terrorism, duh...
what worries me is the amount of lockdown they'd need to keep the lid on literally millions of disaffected people, where will they get that many soldiers. will the affected country turn into one giant armed camp?
anyone see that banned-from-bbc documentary about the aftermath of nuclear war called 'the war game' back in the 60's?
the most traumatic cinema i ever experienced, at 17, to boot.
it has coloured my nightmares ever since.
the main driver to running away as far as hawaii to try and escape the paranoia that film induced.... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
You get the soldiers from the disaffected people, naturally. Bush is a symptom, not the disease.
sounds like a clone of the middle east.
you can't run business-as-usual with a cop/soldier on every corner.
there aren't enough jails to hold the people who won't stand for that.
seems like history has chosen england to be the avant-guarde actor in thjs tech-heavy sci-fi futurist, kinder, gentler totalitarian spy-in-the-sky play.
coulda been japan...i wonder if they have a literary culture that includes a local equivalent of orwell or huxley.
i guess that's what makes tv shows like 'spooks', 'regeneration' etc so fascinating, getting a supposed clue about how surveillance is the new governmental prophylactic of social choice and how deeply it pervades modern, international policing and intelligence work.
computers are truly changing everything ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
