30 days in November 9...

And today is

World Freedom Day

We usually take our freedom to live our lives the way that we want for granted, but this day is designed for us to think about those who aren’t even allowed to voice their opinions publicly.

We think that all this is happening somewhere else. Somewhere where a dictatorship is in charge, a place where people are oppressed by the state and mindnumbed into submission. Not here, not in this England of ours; after all we are a civilised country.

But think carefully on this day, think about what freedom means to you. Think about your freedom of speech, and thought, and law abiding action, because increasingly in Britain these rights, along with may others, are being eroded.

Once it was believed that freedom of speech was a right given by God (or some other such figure) to the British. Men and women would stand on soapboxes at Speaker’s Corner and talk, preach and blather about anything they liked without fear of prosecution, unless of course the police considered they were being treasonous or profane. In reality Speaker’s Corner was no more immune from the law of the land than any other place, but the police allowed a degree of outspokenness.

You’ll notice that I’m speaking in the past tense here. Over the last twenty years or so our civil liberties, including freedom of speech, have been eroded and continue to be closed down. Recent decades have seen a dramatic decline in our hard won civil liberties which include freedom of speech, but there is much, much more at stake.

We are now more observed and monitored than at any other time in our history. Every word we write, every word we speak on our phones can be monitored. It started back in Thatcher’s time with the Interception of Communications Act which gave permission for phone tapping. But it was Blair who oversaw a massive roll out in surveillance under the pretense that it was the only way to win his fictitious ‘war on terror’.

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act allows the government full surveillance powers over all communications and the bugging of phones, spying, and the interception of communications. It allows the police, intelligence services, HM Revenue and Customs and hundreds of other public bodies (including local authorities) to demand the handing over of telephone, internet and postal information including name and address, phone calls made and received, source and destination of emails, internet browsing information and mobile phone positioning data that records user’s location. It’s very open to abuse; some local authorities have used it to check that people aren’t cheating their school place allocation system.

We are constantly watched by cameras, they are on every corner and often hidden or disguised. How can they be to protect us if the authorities don’t want us to know they are there? They are simply watching and monitoring. There were no cameras when I was growing up and Britain has gone from zero to over 4 million CCTV cameras in just a few decades. We have a higher number of cameras than China but despite all this surveillance there is less than one arrest per day as a result of CCTV footage. I know it’s a cliché but Big Brother is here, albeit a little later than predicted. 

Thatcher’s Public Order Act of 1986 (as a result on the miner’s strikes) made it law that, in order to be lawful, protest organisers give police six days advance notice of their action.  Since then successive governments have quietly upgraded the Act to dumb down our right to protest peacefully. This move to stop us protesting, striking, or even complaining continues under David Cameron’s new reign of terror and increasingly protesters are subjected to stop and search, kettling, and snatch and grab arrests by an increasingly armed and militarised police force, with the emphasis being on force.

Before 1984, you could not be held by police for longer than 24 hours without a criminal charge being made against you. Thatcher extended this to four days, Blair to seven, then to 14 days, and then finally sought the power to detain citizens without charge for up to 90 days. Blair was defeated on 90 days, but did manage to increase the time without charge to 28 days. 

Any of us can be electronically tagged at any time under Control Orders passed in the Terrorism Act of 2006. This means that anybody suspected of terrorist related activities by the Home Secretary can be electronically tagged, monitored, restricted from making phone calls and using the internet, banned from some kinds of work, restricted in their movement, have their passport revoked and be ordered to report to the police - and all of this without any type of trial.

We are increasing trapped into towing the party line regardless of who the party is. As a result of all of this, more and more people are being arrested and taken to court for simply saying what they think or showing their dissent. Recent incidents include the convictions of Critical Mass protest riders for cycling on the evening of the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics, and Bethan Tichbourne who was arrested and convicted for shouting ‘Cameron has blood on his hands’ (which of course he has) when he turned on the Christmas lights in her hometown. 

It seems we could be now living in a police state where every thought and opinion we have is monitored and measured against any number of yardsticks including racism, religion, terrorism and of course all the ‘isms’ associated with this ridiculous PC world we have created. There is no room for dissent, no room for questions, and no room for difference. We are just a few steps away from the enforced groupthink of North Korea, and the Ministry of Truth and the reality of thoughtcrime is with us in all but name.

We ignore the erosion of our rights at our peril. With the current government wanting to abolish the Human Rights Act and ongoing moves to obtain access to yet more ‘private’ communications (such as browser histories) we could soon be facing the final destruction of what few civil liberties we have left. It is time to pay attention.

Perhaps World Freedom Day is the day to start doing just that.