h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Much is said about the West being the beacon of freedom for oppressed peoples of the world. We parade our freedoms to anyone who stands still long enough to listen and go so far as to invade countries to impose our "freedom".

But how free are we?

Freedom of speech? - Nope. Not if you're talking about cartoons, within earshot of Westminster or if you hold some political or scientific viewpoints contrary to the mainstream.

Right to a trial by a jury of your peers? - Disappearing fast.

Right to remain silent? - History

Right to privacy? - CCTV on most street corners, microchips in rubbish bins, biometric ID cards on the way, cars to be chipped etc etc.

Today, John Reid revealed his desire to give police the powers to stop and question anyone at any time. To be honest, I always assumed the police had these powers, but now they are to be backed with a £5000 fine for non-compliance. He also muttered darkly about declaring a State of Emergency and withdrawing from parts of the Human Rights Act.

Now, good and valid reasons can be made for each of these actions, but surely the cumulative effect is to make Britain as oppressive as any tinpot African regime? And before anyone says at least people aren't disappeared, tell that to those that have been handed over to the CIA on a nod & a wink before being flown off for torture.

Are we in danger of becoming a police state?

Neil Young famously sang "Keep on rocking in the free world". Can Britain be counted as being a member of that free world?

'good and valid reasons can be made for each of these actions,' I've yet to hear a single good reason sufficiently plausable to back up a single one of those ideas. We're heading inextricibably towards a police state where those 'tales' of people being wisked off in the middl eof the night and never seen again in 'forign lands' won't seem so far fetched were it to be a tale now being told about citizens in our own Country. On the good side, its increased my empathy no end with the suicide bombers and extremeists that are apparently round each and every street corner, no wonder this stuff gets em a tadge irate.

"Freedom of speech? - Nope. Not if you're talking about cartoons, within earshot of Westminster or if you hold some political or scientific viewpoints contrary to the mainstream."

THe hilarious part about his is that it's posted on the internet!

I thought this would be some astronomy question.
Speaking as a non-brit, almost every month I see a news story that makes me grateful I´m not living in the UK. You really are becoming a micro-managed police state.

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Yup. Anonymously. And without being so specific that it gets yikesed. Assuming it were technically possible, how long do you think an image of one of the Mohammed cartoons would stay visible if posted on this thread?

I'd say a few minutes. We do seem to be moving rather ominously towards a police state...

Well I think we still do pretty well in comparison to other countries.

Name another country which is freer in *all* areas of life, giving reasons. I mean you could probaly name some small country that keeps its head down, that never dares gets itself involved with any international contraversy for an easy life. Given the context of recent history in the UK, I don't think what's happening is that bad. Some people *always*view the past with romantic rose tinted glasses. But it's well known that MI5 and MI6 got up to all sorts of dirty tricks during the cold war.And there are rumours a plenty about what was done against PM Wilson, CND, Scargill etc. And I'm sure all sorts of stuff we never got to hear about was done to undermine left wingers and trade unionists ever since Karl Marx came to live in London

I'm quite sure that our freedoms have always been fairly relative, it's just that with a voracious 24 hour media now that everything gets highlighted, especially by those with an agenda.

"You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe...you take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland"

I think the thing is that in practice we're still a very free country, but that we're heading in a dangerous direction.

One distinction to make is: whose freedom? Middle class, white people are probably close to as free as ever in practice, if not in theory.

The thing about 'freedom' is that it's a very subjective thing, and varies according to who's in power. Some bleat on about Islamic cartoons not being shown at the moment. And I agree that's wrong, But it wasn't that long ago that the book 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' was the subject of a trial and the book banned. Early 1960s I believe. Something which seems utterly laughable today.

Gay news were prosecuted for blasephemy in the late 70s in relation to a feature about Christ being gay

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/11/newsid_2499000/2499721.stm

Women weren't given the freedom to have legal abortions until 1967

Homosexuals could be prosecuted I think until the late sixiies.

And as I said earlier many trades unionists and CND acitvists claimed phone tapping and harrasemeent from MI5

Ethnic minorities frequently claimed beatings and harrasement from the police.

Cinema was subject to much greater censorship by the official censor.

And did we hear the 'right' kicking up a fuss about many of these things? And yet their bleating is suddenly deafening. I'm not saying that everything that's happening right now is not concerning. But I think it's always instructive to get an historical perspective on things. Unfotyunately some people are either inacapable of it, or conveniently ignore those things which don't fit with the particular agenda they are pushing.

I find it rather ironic that you SWL are suddenly oh so concerned about our freedoms, that those terrible Socialists are taking from us, and yet you have complained most vociferously about perdectly legal advertisements under the Race Relations Act that enable much greater freedoms for ethnic minorites in terms of employment opportunities. And I think we are yet quite some way from being compared to some 'tin pot African regime' as you so eloquently put it.

You fundamentally miss the point, and it's sod all to do with socialism, capitalism or the like.

Books being banned, films being censored and abortions being frowned on were to do with public morals and a sense of public decency.

The Mohammed cartoons were banned for fear of one section of society going on a killing rampage. They weren't banned out of a sense of right or wrong, but out of fear.

It's not the "right" or the "left" "bleating" as you put it, it's the growing realisation across the general population and, as we've seen here, from abroad that government is increasingly willing to sacrifice what we believe to be our freedoms in the name of the war on terror.

Let's get some perspective here.

There has been one successful bombing attack.

In thirty years of IRA terrorism, which was far more effective and widespread, ID cards and random stops by the police were never proposed.

You want comparisons with other countries? We have more CCTV cameras in Britain than every other country in the world - combined. There's not even a starting point for comparisons. It's the technological equivalent of a watchtower on every corner manned by a copper with binoculars.

>>Books being banned, films being censored and abortions being frowned on were to do with public morals and a sense of public decency.<<

Like I said 'feedom' is a conveniently subjective thing. One man's public morality is another's 'freedom'

Being able to choose to read the books I want and watch the films I want seem very much about 'freedom'. Ask anyone from the former Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. And I also think being able to have control over one's life in terms of having or not having children as a woman is an incredibly important 'freedom' Calling it a question of morals or decency may suit your viewpoint, but it means a dam sight more to me than a few CCTV cameras which either the security personnel forget to put the film in, or just show reams and reams of teenagers getting pished. Okay seriously I don't entirely like it, but at least they're a darn sight more obvious to everyone than secretive phone tapping on certain politivally active individuals. That concers me much more. And it's nothing new, having always gone on, or so 'they' say

And I don't believe ID cards will ever work here. Like I've said before if Thatcher couldn't make it work with football hooligans nobody will.

I think it's all too easy to get overly paranoid about half this stuff that doesn't seem half as important to me as other things. But yes if I *seriously' thought we were on the edge of something approaching a police state I'd be the first to get up in arms about it. It's just that we hardly have enough people to deal with tax, council bureaocracy, police paperwork, so I don't see a great deal to worry about.

Look what happened to the 'child support agency' fiasco!

Freedom will prevail.

Invent a biometric or *transmitting* card and someone invents a Faraday Cage wallet. Erect CCTV cameras on every corner and due to their sheer numbers they can only be monitored after the fact, not to mention that most *bidness* moves inside. People have been hauled off the street for being overtly gay or not having enough money in their pockets in the past, is being questioned as harsh as that? I would suggest that the Mohammed cartoons weren't yanked universally out of fear, some wanted them removed as a sign of respect. There are fanatics on all sides, but luckily there are moderates as well.

Neil Young said it in that sardonic, sarcastic song- *Don't feel like Satan, but I am to them*

I'll keep rockin'.

In the 60's the Labour government set about providing freedoms - they did away with pornography laws, (I was and still am against this) they made homosexuality legal, they removed many confining laws.

Now we have a government that seeks to provide freedom by removing liberties. Thus we have a strange society where the rights of the criminal are protected in law, but the rights of the citizen are being eroded to allow laws to protect him.

So - it is now an offence for me to have sex in my back garden (public decency) yet its permissable to film myself having sex with my wife and publish it on the internet.

Its permissable for me to but cannabis for my own use, but if I refuse to take medication prescribed for me I can be locked up - in case I do any harm.

We are placing control orders on people who we think don't think like us, but who we can't actually charge with anything - or house arrest as we call it when countries we don't like do it.

We are allowing our allies to demand we extradite people who have not been tried, using a treaty they've never ratified, yet we don't seem able to get back our citizens they have locked up without trial.

As a bye the bye I'd say that science not politics gave women control over their own bodies, and that I think abortions are too easily available nowadays.

There are indeed fanatics on all sides, but the way to destroy fanatacism is education not litigation.

Incidentally, Lady Chatterly's Lover was not banned. That's kind of the point: the trial was seen as signposting a turning point.

Incidentally, neither were the Mohammed cartoons. Where there was censorship it was self-censorship, whether out of taste or through fear of bullying by fanatics I couldn't say.

The original post is hyperbola. I'm not keen on some of these new laws, but police state or tin-pot dictatorship are simply ridiculous comparisons.

Hyperbole? Possibly, but the comparison is relevant. Reid also hinted that he was about to declare a state of emergency and derogate from the HR Act, triggering the Civil Contingencies Act.

The CCA was needed, govt told us at the time, to deal with the after-effects of a 9/11-type attack.

Has anyone spotted any planes flying into buildings in the last few days?

"Freedom of speech? - Nope. Not if you're talking about cartoons, within earshot of Westminster or if you hold some political or scientific viewpoints contrary to the mainstream."

Nobody has absolute freedom of speech. I can't, for example, incite racial hatred or violence. I don't have that right to that freedom of speech and quite right too. As with all freedoms, I think it should be absolute freedom of speech within sensible bounds - ie nothing that deliberately encourages serious crime such as murder or violence.

"Right to a trial by a jury of your peers? - Disappearing fast."

Only in some cases and sometimes with good reason - jurys are alas easily intimidated by organised crime and so using jurys to, for example, try a gangland boss is inevitably flawed.

"Right to remain silent? - History"

Again, I think there were good reasons this was done away with that weren't about the state's desire for totalitarian powers.

"Right to privacy? - CCTV on most street corners, microchips in rubbish bins, biometric ID cards on the way, cars to be chipped etc etc."

With the exception of ID cards (which I opppose) all of these are about privacy being invaded within the public sphere - streets, roads etc. I have the right to privacy in my own home, it is absurd to expect not to be watched in a public space. Incidentally, I don't really think ID cards are a privacy issue so much as a cost, convenience, security and civil rights issue (the latter in the sense I shouldn't be required by law to carry one).

"Now, good and valid reasons can be made for each of these actions, but surely the cumulative effect is to make Britain as oppressive as any tinpot African regime? And before anyone says at least people aren't disappeared, tell that to those that have been handed over to the CIA on a nod & a wink before being flown off for torture."

I agree about CIA torture flights, whatever I think of the suspects, but I see that as America's crime that we're involved in rather than something British and homegrown. The worst we've got is 28 days without charge which pales next to Guantanamo Bay or the powers the police have in actual repressive states (bullet to the back of the head and a ditch, usually).

I wish people would read more about actual repressive states before talking about how things are "the same" over here. It really is a form of Godwin's law - saying ID cards or stop-and-search shouldn't happen is one thing, saying it makes us like Syria is quite another.

"Are we in danger of becoming a police state?"

No.

"or if you hold some political or scientific viewpoints contrary to the mainstream."

Incidentally, people are perfectly entitled to hold political scientific viewponts contrary to the mainstream and to publish them. They're also entitled to have them ridiculed, fisked and picked-apart.

There always has to be some kind of balance between freedom of the individual and the power of the state to protect itself, ie more or less the staus quo which continues through the process of voting in a democracy. I was thinking, because of technological changes such as the 'mobile phone' and the 'internet', it is hardly surprising that there are changes being made at present by the state, to roughly keep this balance.

Just because we are not YET in a police state, or on the verge of being in one, doesn't mean we shouldn't be strenuously opposing legislation that takes us in that direction. Why not? Because by the time we ARE in one it will be too late.

Our irrational fears are being played upon to increase police powers and overturn historic rights. It's not enough to express hopeful optimism that it won't turn out too bad. Jefferson was right: "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." Right now we are not being vigilant:

Fanny: "And I don't believe ID cards will ever work here."

What does that even mean? In what way will it 'not work'? And why not?

cl zoomer: "Freedom will prevail."

Why? It hasn't always in the past.

"Invent a biometric or *transmitting* card and someone invents a Faraday Cage wallet."

Technological solutions are not enough. The majority of people will not carry Faraday Cage wallets, just as the majority of people don't turn off cookies in their web browser, disable scripting as a default, run an up to date firewall and virus scanner, use anonymising web services, turn off image loading in their email client, send messages encrypted with PGP, use different passwords for different services, ensure their mail client doesn't send passwords over an unencrypted channel, etc.

SWL: "Right to a trial by a jury of your peers? - Disappearing fast."
Zagreb: "Only in some cases and sometimes with good reason - jurys are alas easily intimidated by organised crime and so using jurys to, for example, try a gangland boss is inevitably flawed."

The danger here is about who decides whether or not you are tried by a jury and on what basis. If intimidation of the jury was the basis, it's possible to imagine a government using this to try political activists without a jury, claiming that they are part of a violent revolutionary group which could do the same things that organised crime could do.

At the moment, it's just restricted to complex fraud cases I think. Again, there is a danger of abuse here. You could attack dissident political groups financially for example.

SWL: "Right to privacy? - CCTV on most street corners, microchips in rubbish bins, biometric ID cards on the way, cars to be chipped etc etc."
Zagreb: "With the exception of ID cards (which I opppose) all of these are about privacy being invaded within the public sphere - streets, roads etc. I have the right to privacy in my own home, it is absurd to expect not to be watched in a public space."

I can't say I like the idea that if you want to keep any privacy you have to sit in your house with the curtains shut:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/4609746.stm

"Incidentally, I don't really think ID cards are a privacy issue..."

It's the database though, not the cards.