By Graham Vanbergen – During
the short course of the 21st century Britain’s ruling class has pushed
its democracy in a direction where the expansion of state powers is
undeniably leading the country towards authoritarianism.
The United Nations privacy chief has called the situation “worse than
scary.” Even UK courts judged that the activities of the government was
in breach of human rights law,
so legislators put forward Bills to legalise it. Apple CEO Tim Cook was
particularly critical, noting that new laws would have “dire consequences”
if introduced, which they were. Harvit Kambo a director at Privacy
International said; “It’s sad that the Snowden revelations backfired so
spectacularly in Britain. Rather than rolling back powers, they’ve been
used to legitimise these practices.”
Britain is now regarded as an endemic surveillance society. It is
run, not by honourable men and women looking to serve their country but
by a pack of snarling wolves, ensuring the flock never steps out of
line. But surveillance is just the start and where it starts is just as
alarming.
Just think about the evidence for a minute. Authoritarianism is defined as: “the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom.”
We already have much of this statement in Britain. In 2014 it was
estimated by government that one million school pupils had been
biometrically finger-printed.
But as it turned out, on further private investigation through Freedom
of Information requests the best guesstimate of the 8.2 million
attending school was that 6 million were on a biometric database of some
sort starting from the age of just four – and that was 10 years ago. By
now one would expect that number to be close to 100% with facial
recognition and other more recent technologies.
