Modern Liberty

I went to catch the train. Buying the ticket was easy - I didn't have to, as all I did was walk through the barrier, my National ID card and my Credit Card had been interrogated by contactless technology. The rescue services said it was much safer if they knew who was in which carriage when the train crashed.

As I walked into the shop my ID card registered my presence, and the CCTV checked it was me. Once or twice a week I get stopped by the security guards, they say it is my fault, because my beard causes more false negatives. The shop keepers say it has reduced shop lifting.

I get home to a message telling me that unless I walk more I will be deemed to have failed to keep my responsibilities to the State, and that the level of my health cover will be reduced. They promise that this will not impact emergency care, but that I will have lower priority in booking appointments. They list my travel over the past month, identifying 20 journeys that I could have walked rather than driven or taken the bus.

While the narrative doesn't seem like such a terrible Dystopia, on closer examination much of it is coming to pass with data already held in the public and private sector. The above is taken, with thanks, from another attendee of the Convention on Modern Liberty that took place over the weekend.

Despite the lack of anything in writing, a comfortable British consensus supports the notion that a set of civil rights are required for the relationship between the state and its citizens (er, subjects) to remain healthy. In recent times, the government has traded some of these in, to more keenly prosecute The War on Terror. Quite a few cross party organisations have sprung up in defence of these rights, that we don't actually have.

The speakers were pretty much those you would expect to see on Question Time; there were multiple panels sessions with the Great and the Good (well, the Guardian anyway) to cover the various areas that have been trampled on recently. Shami Chakrabartis (Liberty) keynote speech was manic, Philip Pulmans (the author and atheist) was lyrical, and that from David Davis (Tory without portfolio) was certainly powerful.

Helena Kennedy suggested there was something in the water in the Home Office, to allow so many rights shaving measures to be introduced. From 42 days detention, ID cards, attacks on the jury system, the DNA database, there was plenty to debate. I say debate - but that isn't quite correct. There was little discussion on how or why, only on what method of complaint was best. Its as if the awkward parents of teenage lovers were working out how to punish their delinquents.

The ID card debate is a good example of this. We all move around with dozens of pieces of plastic that refer to some data on ourselves. A possible future scenario could involve a policeman asking me to produce an ID card. I "willingly" give my data to private companies, but I should not be forced to give it to a "central state database". The fear of the government holding data appeared to the delegates as a massive spectre; the shit loads of data held privately was of little interest. In fact the idea of the State being separated by some Chinese wall from the private sector is fairly quaint.

As the young black inner London New Labour MP pointed out, CCTV does improve the experience in otherwise dangerous Streatham neighbourhoods. In fact the few New Labour representatives tended to talk in a different language. They talked about "mainstreaming" and "service delivery". Maybe that is not so surprising. The chattering classes are mainly talking to themselves, whereas the government is trying to communicate with the electorate, and the electorate are only talking to Tescos.

As dangerous as correlated data is, the structures of repression cannot cause that repression by osmosis. It has to be in peoples brains, or it doesn't exist. Once there, any law can be bent to the needs of hatred. I give you the SPG.

There is something rotting inside the current administration, but it is not the result of some choreographed master plan. People have to ask themselves, did they believe that the London bomings on 7/7 was the work of Al Qaeda, because Tony Blair said so? I can't remember a lot of people questioning him at the time. It is the forgotten moments of fear and compliance that gave birth to most of the curbs in civil rights we see now. Look back in anger all you want.