Third Way politics and individual freedom

Under New Labour, this is how the UK ranks in protecting the privacy of its citizens:



Worse than the United States under Bush. Equaled only by Russia and China.

From the Guardian:

Shamingly, among the very worst offenders, the most careless with its citizens' liberties, the most profligate in surveillance, is the British state. Once proud to style itself "mother of the free", Britain has the most watched society in Europe. The country that invented habeas corpus now boasts one of the longest periods of detention without charge in the civilised world. And the guardians of national security want to make that even longer. Yet these same guardians cannot detect illegal immigrants working in their own offices (and even, in one case, reportedly helping to repair the prime minister's top-security car), nor detain a terrorist suspect (who turned out to be a wholly innocent Brazilian) without shooting him in the head.

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Privacy International, the human rights group which monitors surveillance societies worldwide, says Britain is the worst-performing democracy in this respect. Take a look at the map on their website (privacyinternational.org): Britain is the only country in the whole western world to be coloured black, an "endemic surveillance society", alongside communist China and Putin's Russia. The UK has more than 4 million CCTV cameras. Its national DNA database, the largest in the world, is supposed to have some 4.25 million people on it by the end of next year - or roughly one in every 14 inhabitants. According to the last published report of the interception of communications commissioner, more than 400,000 official requests were made to tap telephone calls and monitor emails in the period from January 2005 to March 2006. A staggering 795 security, police and local authority bodies are entitled to make such requests. Need I go on?

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It's interesting to ask why this historic homeland of freedom has erred so much on the side of restricting freedom. Is it just, as is often said, the "authoritarian reflexes" of New Labour? Or is it precisely because we think of ourselves as a land of old and self-evident liberty that we are so relaxed about letting this and that right or customary freedom (each seemingly small in itself) be sliced away?

The myth - our own myth about ourselves - is so strong that we don't see the changed reality underneath. We go on saying, "It's a free country, isn't it?", and don't recognise that it's less so by the day. I find it suggestive that Britain, probably the freest society in Europe in the last century, is now the most watched society in Europe, while Germany, a country with a unique 20th-century double experience - Nazi and Stasi - of unfreedom, is now, according to Privacy International, the least watched.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2211272,00.html


This is why there's so much suspicion of American politicians - and one in particular - who have embraced 'Third Way' ideology. And possibly the suspicion is justified.

Thanks much.

Solidarity!

themselves progressive by hijacking the word).

They lost 25 Million records recently, of people receiving child benefits. (This is a credit that everyone with children receives in the UK.) The information included bank details and every bit of personal data you can imagine. Some low level government clerk received a request from another department for the info, so he burned it to two CDs and posted them without any security. GONE. Perhaps lost in a mail room somewhere behind some boxes, but there's no way of knowing for sure.

Then just yesterday it came to light that even more data records have been "lost" by the government.

And these Keystone Cops want to create and manage a NATIONAL database?

Our government is no better. Remember they "lost" a similar number of veterans' records not long ago, in a similar manner. And then that expanded into an even bigger loss.

Yes, I suspect these things aren't simply going missing. But it doesn't matter because either way, the data they're compiling on us is obviously NOT SECURE.

'Third Way' politics. The weird combination of wanting to control everything, and being totally careless and incompetent about the details, are characteristics of Blair and some of his followers- and derive to some degree originally from Thatcher (though she was less careless!)

Overall, the incompetence prevents the surveillance from causing as serious problems as you would thing - the government try to get all sorts of data, and then can't keep track of where they are, and no one has time to attend to them. On the other hand, as recently happened, if lots of ID data gets lost, and potentially into the hands of crooks, this doesn't exactly thrill us with joy!

But these are characteristics of a particular set of people. They are not an intrinsic part of 'Third Way' policies. And I say this as an economic left-winger who is not at all happy with New Labour economics.