Coming in from my gig tonight I watched what I thought was going to be the end of the film The Pianist, but it’s such a long (and brilliant) film it turned out to be another two hours of unremitting Nazi-inflicted hell. There’s this one point in it where Szpilman, Brody’s character, is hiding out in an apartment after the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. He has to be deadly silent or it will alert the neighbours to the fact that he’s hiding in there (and therefore is Jewish – obviously). He drops a shelf full of plates and within 30 seconds there’s a knock and the neighbours are shouting, who is in there, we’ll call the police. Later on, he tries to escape quietly, but as he’s in the hallway there’s a scream and this woman has seen him. She is shouting, show me your ID card! Where are your papers? I’ll call the police! And I thought, hey that’ll be Britain in about 20 years’ time.
OK, I know how this sounds. I start comparing the machinery of the Nazi state to the joys of life in modern Britain, and I come across like one more raving terrorist to deal with just when we’ve got a boat load from Guantanamo. But hear me out.
If things go the way it’s looking and pretty soon we all have to have an ID card to prove who we are at all times, we are fucked. We have learned no lessons from the war. We have learned no lessons from any war, from any experience of how terrorism works or how totalitarianism works. I’m not even sure we’ve learned how to be human. If we start expecting people to produce a card before they can rent a flat, get a bank account, have access to healthcare, a card that tracks all their movements and data… then you could just as easily turn that card off and make that person a non-person. ‘Sorry, everybody with this type of card issued after this date may not have access to certain types of jobs and is only allowed to live in X area. It’s for the good of the country and to avoid terrorism. These people’s activity patterns are suspect and we think they may be dissidents. They must be sent for interrogation and water-boarding in Liverpool.’ Might not sound harsh to you, but I’ve gigged there.
So I’m well aware of the irony of writing this pro-privacy stuff on a social networking site. But given that I’ve registered to refuse to have an ID card if they introduce them and paid money into the legal fund working to oppose the idea, it seems logical to say these things in public and normalise the idea of opposing the scheme – and other surveillance phenomena. For example, I read a letter in the Guardian last week, from a man who’s just taken over a pub in Islington. He needed a new licence for the pub, which had to be approved by various organisations, including the police. The police agreed to approve his application on the condition that he install CCTV cameras that capture the head and shoulders of everyone coming into the pub, and that the police could see this on request. This guy wrote to the local Labour MP to challenge it – and obviously she didn’t reply – then spoke to a friend of his who is the licensing officer for another borough. “Not only did he tell me there was nothing I could do to overturn this, he also strongly advised me not to blot my copybook with the police by even questioning the request; I would not want them against me in the future, he said”.
The guy (Nick Gibson) finished his letter by saying that even though he has been in a silent rage since he first heard of this request, “at every turn I am alternately advised to keep my head down or laughed at for my naivety for thinking that the world was not ever thus. When was it that the constant small erosion of our liberties became irreversible?”
This sounds familiar. First, it sounds like Animal Farm, when the pigs in charge try and tell the other animals that things have always been this way, that bad is good, that quality of life is improved, when you know in your heart that this is just a FUCKING LIE you are being told, but you no longer have the energy to challenge it. Because you have been told so many lies you become exhausted by their quantity, and where do you start? Secondly, everyone is afraid of being thought stupid, or credulous, and looking like some conspiracy theorist raving nutjob if they start saying, hang on, isn’t this all a bit mental? Just how paranoid are we and just how much more police state does it have to get round here before we’re all living all our lives as though we were being watched at all times, just in case, and informing on our neighbours?
Thirdly, the real interesting thing is the apparent impossibility, and dangerousness of being seen to challenge any of this legislation. If people don’t start doing it soon, and all the time, and not thinking that this will make them look like a terrorist, or suspected of committing a crime, then the moment will be lost and we will truly be living in hell. Challenge the encroachment of CCTV – my boyfriend, a photographer, was interrogated by the police the other month for taking photographs! – write to your MP, refuse to have an ID card, vote for any party that will get rid of them, find out what the Magna Carta was, work out that there is now basically NO RIGHT OF APPEAL against unlawful imprisonment under current terror laws… Cos that’s where all this is leading. Towards the situation where YOU, an innocent person, can be arrested, in case you are not innocent.
That’s why I say, to the stupid, stupid woman Catherine Conroy who wrote in response to Nick Gibson’s letter in The Guardian that CCTV is not a threat to freedom and is only “a threat to freedom to commit a crime” – you are part of the problem. And you clearly haven’t the imagination to understand what kind of grim future world you are dumbly helping to create.
Good God, I need the light of dawn, don’t I. And it is also possible I shouldn’t have given up drinking. I just have a shit load more reading time now.
