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.
In America last Thursday, Tony Blair, our former prime minister, demanded
vigilance against what he portrayed as a “fascist” Iranian assault on
western values. These values he listed vaguely as “liberty, democracy,
freedom of speech and thought”. Blair has never, to my knowledge, defined
these words in terms that could be measured against his own performance,
lest it draw attention to how far modern government infringes them. So who
is to defend these values on the home front?
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?
Of course red lines must be drawn, between individuals and the state as
between the state and the European super-state but we have forgotten red
lines for the former. Public expectation is of a safer Britain and of a
government that will, to some degree, ensure it. But nobody knows what that
degree should be. There is a case for educating the public to eat, drink and
smoke less, drive more carefully and not to rampage through town centres at
night. But there must be a limit to the translation of disapproval into
repression.
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.
Surely even Blair has learnt that going to war is not enough.
simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk
