A week or two away from the land of surveillance and you realise what a very strange place Britain has become. On my return from holiday I understood one frightening truth, which is that surveillance systems and databases have become as much a part of the country's infrastructure as the road or rail networks. No government, however liberal or determined, has the power to dismantle the apparatus that Labour has put in place.
On the thread of my most recent post, divesandlazarus asked, "I wonder if in 2010 Cameron will be able to 'press default' and return the criminal justice system legislation to what it was in 1997." The answer of course is that he won't be able to, even if he wanted to, and the same issue applies to the databases that form Labour's dreadful legacy.
There is no return from this point. All we can hope to do is find politicians at the next election who have a real understanding of the pace of technology and its implications for privacy, and they begin to find means of controlling data gathering and surveillance. This requires effort in the political classes as well as among voters. I see no evidence of that.
During the last dozen years we have constantly been assured that govnernment databases are there to help us and that they will be tightly controlled to guarantee individual liberty. A key part of this promise is the guarantee that systems will not link up to share information. That is baloney. The whole point of the project to create a super structure that will know everything about us and will make each one of us dependent on the database.
