Simon Jenkins is a highly-respected senior columnist, and while we may not always agree with what he says there is no doubt that he says it exceedingly well. His long article "You're better safe than free - the mantra of the Whitehall Taliban" in the Sunday Times a week ago was a masterpiece of cogent comment, a succinct summary of what so many thinking people feel about modern British society.
Here, slightly abridged, is what he had to say …
How much did you drink last week? In Harrogate 26.4% of you had between 12 and 17 "large" glasses of wine (depending on your sex), in Mole Valley 25.5% of you did, and in Leeds 25.3%. Don't ask me how the government knows this. It apparently wants to "target middle-class drinkers". Public money must be squandered, so why not measure the nation's drinking habits?
Meanwhile the makers of the film, The Bourne Ultimatum, needed a location where a character could be watched by police as he moved step by step about the city. Did they use Moscow or Berlin or New York? No, they used London. They did so because Britain is the world capital of surveillance, deploying a fifth of the global stock of closed-circuit television cameras, even though the Home Office admitted last week that they were next to useless.
Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, wants to give the police and others access to all mobile phone records - and one day possibly the satellite tracking of car movements. Smith wants to supplement this material with electronic identity cards, including personal and criminal details, and computerised medical records. If the lord chief justice and others get their way the DNA of every native of, and visitor to, Britain will be added to this mighty store.
Given the number of access points - police, National Health Service, Whitehall, local councils and insurance companies - and given the ease of modern computer hacking, every Briton's life story will be open to all and vulnerable to all. One result is that millions may find it impossible to get credit or insurance cover.
Other ministers are no less assiduous. Lecturers at London's Imperial College have been delivered a stern warning. They should ascertain the exact ages of students and not be alone with any who are under 18. The college must first subject them to "appropriate Criminal Records Bureau disclosure" for fear they might be on the sex offenders' register. Such paranoid red tape applies to academics in no other country.
Round at health they are vexed by news of cigarette smoke blowing back through open doors. The result is a "prevailing wind" protocol that requires smoke exhalation to take place not less than 6 metres from a door or window opening. (Tape measures should be included in every cigarette packet.) Last week came the information that half of all Britons "could be clinically obese" within 25 years. Adding in as many costs as officials could imagine to scare ministers into legislation, they came up with a charge to the nation of a stunning £45 billion a year by 2050. They suggested bans on the advertising and sale of fatty foods.
As an additional horror to justify further control, they claimed the proportion of "middle-class adults" drinking "above sensible" quantities of alcohol was "from 14.1% to 26.4%". Such idiot exactitude applied to subjective concepts is reminiscent of the Soviet Union.
The twin forces of personal surveillance and nanny statism are operating a pincer movement against Blair's "shared values". Of course, anybody walking through a British town centre is upset by the number of fat people on the street and by scenes of youthful drunkenness. In the centre of York earlier this month I watched a man selling killer portions of hamburger to a queue of universally obese men, women and children. The experience was as offensive visually as it was medically. For a brief moment I would have applauded his removal by the police.
Voltaire and John Stuart Mill insisted there should be an ideological chasm between disapproving an act and wanting it halted. In modern Britain this chasm has become a skip and a jump. Whatever we dislike we require the government to ban.
Why not ban the sale of fatty foods, as it had done in school canteens? Surely it should ban smoking anywhere, since it "kills". And why not ban the walking of dogs in parks, the use of cycles on pavements, swimming in the sea and all physical contact of children by adults? I can drum up a news story showing all these activities as detrimental to the general wellbeing.
I accept that there is a case for ID cards: a few careless fraudsters and immigrants might be stopped from cheating on social security but this is not remotely worth £12 billion of public money. The case for a nationwide medical computer is equally trivial. It is that paramedics might give the wrong drug to an accident victim who has forgotten his allergies but can remember his NHS Pin number. Nobody balances a cost above £15 billion against the benefit, let alone against the general infringement of privacy and the certainty of computer hacking by insurers and others. In all these cases, ministers merely deploy the dictator's gambit that the "innocent have nothing to fear".
While the melody of liberty plays sweet in the clouds, down below authority has all the best tunes. Complain about Whitehall's obsession with health and safety and someone will belabour you with a man who fell off a ladder.
The fixation with paedophilia after the Soham murders has led to a lunatic investigatory regime that assumes all in childcare are guilty of terrible crimes until proved innocent. Too bad if thousands of volunteers are driven from such work and parents are left with their children under lock and key. I have no doubt that when the Madeleine McCann tragedy is resolved there will be "calls" to extend negligence laws to parental behaviour on holiday.
This disproportionate authoritarianism is the legacy of Blair's Britain, unamended by Gordon Brown. They may talk about values, but at the coal face they are backsliders. Every decision of government must come with a "risk assessment", one of the most useless generators of red tape and maladministration ever invented. A policeman cannot save a drowning boy or be sent on a drugs raid without a training certificate and safety check. Fine words are spoken about helping children to be adventurous, but if a child has an accident at school, health and safety officials will strive to put some teacher in jail. Not for nothing are banana republics run by "committees of public safety". Who could object to safety, as if better safe than free?
Each new straw may seem sensible in itself until suddenly we have broken the camel's back. We find that we have crossed the line from a mature, responsible democracy into an arthritic and fearful police state. Aspects of British public administration are reminiscent of the Taliban.
The only real defence of Blair's "liberty, democracy and freedom" is to demand, constantly and tediously, that each extension of state power be justified as proportionate, cost-effective and consonant with these values. The onus should be on the executive to justify intrusion and repression, not on individuals to resist it. There is no way that ID cards pass this test.
All acts of government already submit to a safety and risk audit. They should submit also to a liberty audit. Mill declared that "over his own mind and body the individual is sovereign", a sovereignty to be infringed by the state only in his explicit dealings with others. Such infringements should be monitored day in, day out. There is no other way of guarding the values we preach so smugly to others yet ignore ourselves.
Naturally enough, Sunday Times readers had a few points of their own to add …
"An excellent article, but one point it misses is the "Dangerous Pictures Act" concealed in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill 2007 which will introduce pure Thought Crime! It will criminalise "extreme or violent pornography" and relies on the apathy or distaste of the people to sneak in a law that would get you three years in jail, for possessing an image that in someone's subjective opinion "appears to risk serious harm" and is "for sexual arousal". This doesn't mean harm was actually caused to anyone, it just has to look that way.
The idea is that "if people don't see stuff like that, they won't try to copy it", but it denies adults the right to make up their own minds what is or isn't acceptable for them to view." - Graham Marsden, Portsmouth
"The UK is getting closer to a single rule of law where everything that is not mandatory is forbidden. This government seems determined to criminalise the majority of the population by systematic use of fear-factor legislation to threaten the majority of law-abiding people with prison sentences but does little to manage the actual violence and abuse practised by a minority.
Labour was voted a huge majority and have systematically used it to strip the electorate of any voice by railroading endless new law. It will never be possible to know what Tony said to Gordon in their private and "bully boys" closed meetings. Previous governments left records. Not this one.
Thought crime is heading for the statute books: prison sentences for people caught with "extreme pornography", even though it's not clear if the people or the pictures are supposed to be dangerous, or who is supposed to be at risk. Even if it's fake.
Write to your MP, they are meant to be working for YOU." - J Fox, London
"This should be compulsory reading for everyone in the UK. Maybe someone will invade us and give us democracy, human rights, freedom of speech and rid us of this oppressive government." - Charlie, Glasgow.
… and from Dave H of Cannock, the comment that for us comes closest to the nub of the matter …"
"The real tragedy is that the British people seem more than happy with New Labour's authoritarian state. They have no problem with the demolition of their civil liberties, legal rights and basic, historic checks and balances. They are happy to be barcoded like supermarket meat for their ID cards. They support the deluge of sledgehammer bans, the summary and arbitary justice, the uncontrolled endemic surveillance that rivals that of any dictatorship . It does not bother them that their home is no longer their castle and that an ever-growing army of 'officials' can demand entry to it.
New Labour has been the most authoritarian, reckless and sinister Government this country has ever witnessed. The distinct, well-defined and sacred space that used to exist between the citizen and the State has been utterly breached. Yet it has been part of a winning formula. It's one thing to lose faith in politicians but to lose faith in your own people is for me, utterly heartbreaking."
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