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

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THE MALEVOLENT WHISPERS THAT DESPISE OUR FREEDOM
by
Phillip Pullman

"Are such things done on Albion’s shore?

The image of this nation that haunts me most powerfully is that of the sleeping giant Albion in William Blake’s prophetic books. Sleep, profound and inveterate slumber: that is the condition of Britain today.

We do not know what is happening to us. In the world outside, great events take place, great figures move and act, great matters unfold, and this nation of Albion murmurs and stirs while malevolent voices whisper in the darkness - the voices of the new laws that are silently strangling the old freedoms the nation still dreams it enjoys.

We are so fast asleep that we don’t know who we are any more. Are we English? Scottish? Welsh? British? More than one of them? One but not another? Are we a Christian nation - after all we have an Established Church - or are we something post-Christian? Are we a secular state? Are we a multifaith state? Are we anything we can all agree on and feel proud of?

The new laws whisper:

You don’t know who you are

You’re mistaken about yourself

We know better than you do what you consist of, what labels apply to you, which facts about you are important and which are worthless

We do not believe you can be trusted to know these things, so we shall know them for you

And if we take against you, we shall remove from your possession the only proof we shall allow to be recognised

The sleeping nation dreams it has the freedom to speak its mind. It fantasises about making tyrants cringe with the bluff bold vigour of its ancient right to express its opinions in the street. This is what the new laws say about that:

Expressing an opinion is a dangerous activity

Whatever your opinions are, we don’t want to hear them

So if you threaten us or our friends with your opinions we shall treat you like the rabble you are

And we do not want to hear you arguing about it

So hold your tongue and forget about protesting

What we want from you is acquiescence

The nation dreams it is a democratic state where the laws were made by freely elected representatives who were answerable to the people. It used to be such a nation once, it dreams, so it must be that nation still. It is a sweet dream.

You are not to be trusted with laws

So we shall put ourselves out of your reach

We shall put ourselves beyond your amendment or abolition

You do not need to argue about any changes we make, or to debate them, or to send your representatives to vote against them

You do not need to hold us to account

You think you will get what you want from an inquiry?

Who do you think you are?

What sort of fools do you think we are?

The nation’s dreams are troubled, sometimes; dim rumours reach our sleeping ears, rumours that all is not well in the administration of justice; but an ancient spell murmurs through our somnolence, and we remember that the courts are bound to seek the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and we turn over and sleep soundly again.

And the new laws whisper:

We do not want to hear you talking about truth

Truth is a friend of yours, not a friend of ours

We have a better friend called hearsay, who is a witness we can always rely on

We do not want to hear you talking about innocence

Innocent means guilty of things not yet done

We do not want to hear you talking about the right to silence

You need to be told what silence means: it means guilt

We do not want to hear you talking about justice

Justice is whatever we want to do to you

And nothing else

Are we conscious of being watched, as we sleep? Are we aware of an ever-open eye at the corner of every street, of a watching presence in the very keyboards we type our messages on? The new laws don’t mind if we are. They don’t think we care about it.

We want to watch you day and night

We think you are abject enough to feel safe when we watch you

We can see you have lost all sense of what is proper to a free people

We can see you have abandoned modesty

Some of our friends have seen to that

They have arranged for you to find modesty contemptible

In a thousand ways they have led you to think that whoever does not want to be watched must have something shameful to hide

We want you to feel that solitude is frightening and unnatural

We want you to feel that being watched is the natural state of things

One of the pleasant fantasies that consoles us in our sleep is that we are a sovereign nation, and safe within our borders. This is what the new laws say about that:

We know who our friends are

And when our friends want to have words with one of you

We shall make it easy for them to take you away to a country where you will learn that you have more fingernails than you need

It will be no use bleating that you know of no offence you have committed under British law

It is for us to know what your offence is

Angering our friends is an offence

It is inconceivable to me that a waking nation in the full consciousness of its freedom would have allowed its government to pass such laws as:

the Protection from Harassment Act (1997),
the Crime and Disorder Act (1998),
the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000),
the Terrorism Act (2000),
the Criminal Justice and Police Act (2001),
the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (2001),
the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Extension Act (2002),
the Criminal Justice Act (2003),
the Extradition Act (2003),
the Anti-Social Behaviour Act (2003),
the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act (2004),
the Civil Contingencies Act (2004),
the Prevention of Terrorism Act (2005),
the Inquiries Act (2005),
the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (2005),

not to mention a host of pending legislation such as

the Identity Cards Bill,
the Coroners and Justice Bill, and the
Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.

Inconceivable.

And those laws say:

Sleep, you stinking cowards

Sweating as you dream of rights and freedoms

Freedom is too hard for you

We shall decide what freedom is

Sleep, you vermin

Sleep, you scum

PHILIP PULLMAN: In my ten minutes I want to say something about this nation as it might be, and about the virtues that sustain a living and waking nation. I’m not going to spend much time on the vices that undermine it, although, as every storyteller knows, it’s easier and more fun to talk about vice than about virtue. There are plenty of things to say about the vices of the nation we live in, but I shan’t dwell on them now. Hard as it is, I’m going to stick with virtue.

So: what are the virtues that a nation needs in order to be a state fit for human beings to live in?

First of all, it needs courage. Courage is a foundational virtue: it’s what we need in order to act kindly even when we’re afraid, in order to exercise good judgement even in the midst of confusion and panic, in order to deal with long-term necessity even when short-term expediency would be easier. A courageous nation would not be afraid of its own newspapers; it would continue to do what was right even when loud voices were urging it to do wrong. It would stand up to economic interests when others were more important, and yes, there are interests that are more important than short-term economic benefits: such a nation, for example, would rule out new coal-fired power stations full stop. It would have the guts to say to the financial interests that wanted to put them up “No. You can’t do it, and that’s the end of the matter. Find something less destructive to invest in.” And when it came to the threat of external danger, a courageous nation would take a clear look at the danger and take realistic steps to avert it. It would not take up a machine-gun to defend itself against a wasp.

Another virtue that a nation needs is intellectual curiosity. Wakefulness of mind might be another term for it. A nation with that quality would be aware of itself, conscious of itself and of its history, and of every thread that makes up the tapestry of its culture. It would believe that the highest knowledge of itself had been expressed by its artists, its writers and poets, and it would teach its children how to know, how to understand, and how to love their work - we need to be taught how to love - believing that this activity would give them, the children, an important part to play in the self-knowledge and memory of the nation. A nation where this virtue was strong would be active and enquiring of mind, quick to perceive and compare and consider. Such a nation would know at once when a government tried to interfere with its freedoms. It would remember how all those freedoms had been gained, because each one would have a story attached to it, and an attack on any of them would feel like a personal affront. That’s the value of wakefulness.

Now I didn’t imagine, when I was asked to speak at this convention, that I would find myself considering the subject of virtue, but actually it’s inescapable. And the next virtue I want to praise is modesty. Modesty, which is not at all the same as humility, not at all the same as prudishness, not at all the same as self-abasement. Modesty in a nation consists among other things of fitting the form to the meaning, and not mistaking style for substance. A modest kingdom, for instance, would have to think for a moment or two to remember whether or not it was a republic, because its royal family would be small, and its members would be allowed to spend most of their time in useful and interesting careers as well as being royal, and because their love affairs would remain their own business; and people would always be glad to see them cycling past. Why does this matter? Twenty-one years ago, Charter 88 began to show us that every part of our complex and bewildering unwritten constitution was tangled up with every other part. In order to improve this, we had to alter that. In order to let information flow properly here, we had to remove an obstruction way off over there. These things are all connected. So acquiring modesty, a proper sense of our size and position in the world, would be a big step towards reducing the self-importance of politicians who imagine that they are defying existential threats to Western civilization when they are merely throwing their weight around behind the bicycle sheds like a playground bully.

There are many more virtues I could consider, but there’s one I can’t leave out, and that is honour. Whatever made members of our parliament think it was honourable to pocket large fees in exchange for pushing legislation? Whatever persuaded a minister of the crown to think it was honourable to conceal the truth about how this nation’s cabinet decided to lead us to war? Whatever led a government to think it was honourable to spy on its own people? These things are a continuum. The small offenders get caught; the big ones smirk as they talk about realism and efficiency and extraordinary times needing extraordinary measures. Just imagine for a moment a nation with the courage, with the modesty, with the simple wakeful clarity of mind that are so near at hand, so easy to find, if only we knew. Imagine a government that trusted the people who elected it. Imagine agencies of the state that regarded the people’s privacy as something it was the state’s duty to guard, rather like the value of their money and the historic individuality of their town centres and their freedom to speak and write as they like. Imagine a nation that cherished these things as a kind of natural blessing, something obviously good that needed no justification, something like sunshine or kindness or clean water. Or honour.

Before I finish I want to say something briefly about how virtue manifests itself in daily life, local life. I saw three things, three little things recently in this nation of ours that give me hope that the spirit of virtue, common, public, civic virtue is still alive where people are free to act without interference.

One is an example of folk traffic calming. People living in a residential road in Oxford, home to a lot of families and children, a road which normally functions as a rat-run for cars, recently decided to take matters into their own hands and demonstrate that the street is a place for everyone, not just for people in large heavy mobile steel objects. They set up a living-room right in the road, with a sofa, a carpet, a coffee table, and held a tea-party. They parked their own cars in a chevron formation all the way along the road, and put planters containing bushes and small trees there too, not blocking it, just calming the traffic down. They set up a walk-in petrol addiction clinic. The result was that cars could easily get through, but drivers couldn’t see clear from one end of the road to the other and didn’t feel it was just for driving along at 30 miles an hour. Everyone shared the whole space. It was a triumph: wit and inventiveness in the service of a decent human standard of life.

The second thing I saw was a foundry on an industrial estate in Gloucestershire. They make castings for sculptors in every kind of metal and on every scale from the minute to the monumental. The company was founded 20 years ago, and starting from nothing they now have over 80 craftspeople working flat out, many of them trained by the company itself. When I visited them a couple of weeks ago every corner was full of busy, vital, creative activity. That is another example of what I mean by virtue: the goodness of productive work. The nation is a better place because of it. John Ruskin would have recognised that; and he would have seen the economic threat that hangs over it, too.

The third thing I saw was a television programme. We have a Poet Laureate in this country; we also have a Children’s Laureate, and the Laureate at the moment is Michael Rosen, a great man, I think. The programme was about a project he undertook with a school in South Wales where books had been undervalued for one reason or another. He showed the children and the teachers and the parents the profound value of reading and all it can do to deepen and enrich our life, and he did so not by following curriculum guidelines and aiming at targets and putting the children through tests, but by beginning with delight. Enchantment. Joy. The librarians there were practically weeping with relief and pleasure at seeing so many children now coming in to search the shelves and sit and read and talk about the books they’re enjoying. But the libraries are still under threat.

Now what have these things to do with freedom and the threats to freedom that we’ve been hearing about today? What has the virtue of delight to do with the virtue of liberty?

Everything. A nation whose laws express fear and suspicion cannot sustain delight for very long; joy does not flourish in the garden of anxiety. The society these laws seem to be designed to bring about is one of institutionalised paranoia, of surly hatred and low-level panic. Every scrap of delight and gladness we can find is a blow against that fear; every instance of civility and kindness we come across is a clean wind dispersing a foul vapour. Every example we cherish of imaginative play, of the energy of creation, of the enchantment of art and the wonder of science is a weapon in the arsenal of moral and civic and, yes, political virtue. I say weapon, and I say arsenal, advisedly: we have a fight on our hands. “I will not cease from mental fight,” said William Blake, and this is the fight he meant: the fight to defend, to restore, and to sustain the virtue which is not now, but could so easily be, the natural behaviour of the state.

We are a better people than our government believes we are; we are a better nation.

http://www.modernliberty.net/2009/philip-pullmans-keynote

I've not read any Philip Pullman before. He's a good writer. To what extent are liberties being eroded in Britain?

TRiG.

Section 110 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 was ‘tacked onto’ an otherwise acceptable piece of legislation and allows ANY police officer in England and Wales to arrest, (i.e. physically detain, handcuff and take to a police station for a DNA sample), ANY person, for ANY offence, no matter how trivial and whether or not a power of arrest previously existed for that offence. People can now be, (and have been), arrested and detained under Section 110 for not wearing a seatbelt; dropping litter; shouting in the presence of a police officer, climbing a tree, and building a snowman. Whereas police officers used to have to justify every arrest and be aware of whether or not a particular piece of legislation gave them power, they no longer have to do so. The power to deprive someone of their liberty should only be exercised in the most extreme circumstances, yet young and inexperienced police officers, (and soon, PCSO’s), are being trained that arrest and detention of a suspect is the first option in most encounters with the public. This sweeping power is being roundly abused on a daily basis in all of the 43 police forces in this country and puts you, your wife, husband or partner, your children and your friends at risk of arbitrary action by the police.

David Gilbertson QPM
(formerly Assistant Inspector of Constabulary
Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary,
Home Office (retired 2001))

Last month, a new law was passed making it illegal to photograph the police. Part of "anti-terror" legislation, it's supposedly to stop terrorists collecting information. But we've seen "anti-terror" legislation used by councils to snoop on people's wheely bin or to remove old men from party conferences so it's not illogical to think that the lines of this law too will be blurred. So we won't get any Rodney King episodes in Britain.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-279587.html

Time to learn how to implement PGP, I think.

TRiG.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1163786/Stasi-HQ-UK---details-journeys-secretly-logged-kept-decade.html

Yes, alright, I know which newspaper it is Guess I better get ready for the rozzers to kick down my door and drag me off while I enjoy my chilli non carne

But we've ALWAYS been at war with Eastasia.

Anhaga posted a link in the "What new story" thread that explained clearly how the current financial crises came about and how govt is powerless to act. Combining that story with those above, really makes you wonder if we have anything like democracy.

And as someone else said, we may not have a Police State, but Labour have put in all the mechanisms for one and it's likely the Tories are going to be in next. And we know how authoritarian *they* can be.

Sad... the Western Democracies are in a race to totalitarianism.

I read a piece by Niall Ferguson recently. In his opinion the world is in the same kind of position as it was in 1930. A declining economic & military power being challenged by up & coming powers against a background of economic flux.

I agree with that. We've all brought this situation on ourselves and I'm not looking forward to what happens next, whatever that might be

Incidentally, the linked article in the OP has reappeared again.

Some Bishop described Pullman as the most dangerous man in Britain.

There are many people who fear the truth, and they fear those who speak it even more.

I see the Lords managed to stop secret inquests ~ again.

Hi swl ... thanks for posting Pullman's comments, they are very interesting. Here in South Africa we are very far from a 'police state'.

I'm not sure if the world is in the same position as it was in 1930. For one difference, there are now over three times as many people in the world as there was in 1930. We're facing a global ecological collapse *along with* great potential for further economic collapse. We have elites that must feel more threatened than ever before, if they know what's going on. We also have weapons much more powerful and sophisticated than we had in 1930. We also now have incredible worldwide communication and information systems and networks that can be used by the elite to deceive, control and brainwash, but that can *also* be used *against* the elite to unite people and rally them to causes.

So anyways I have no idea what will happen but it will sure be interesting.

Pinching a couple of quotes for elsewhere SWL ~ hope you don't mind.

Knock yourself out.

You might also be interested in - http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/bettergovernment/2010/01/a-complete-and-utter-disgrace.html

You linked to the TPA?