Jackanory

A renowned England-hater, Jack Straw, has launched a broadside at the Convention on Modern Liberty from a little known Blackburn blog.

Is big brother watching you? Are you – innocent and law-abiding – kept awake at night for fear that your door will be kicked in by agents of the state?

Are your children being “groomed for life in the database state”?

If some of those attending a conference last weekend – the Convention on Modern Liberty – are to be believed, the answer to those questions, and many similar, is “yes.”

I mention this because in the same week that national newspaper stories warned that the government is deliberately trampling on individual liberties and undermining public safety, a story in the Lancashire Telegraph told us that crime is going down.

So, let me get this right, crime is going down thanks to the database state and because we have become an endemic surveillance society? So it follows that in order that we can all live in safety it is permissible for the State to spy on the Individual to make society a better place? For whom?

"under Socialism crime is not a form of protest against the existing conditions of life [i.e. as it is in the West] but above all the result of moral deformation of the personality, intellectual retardedness and low culture" - Nikolay Shchelokov, Soviet Minister for Internal Affairs, Pravda, 17 March 1973.

Nothing to fear, nothing to hide. We're all retards to Jack Straw.