Orwellian infrastructure in place
In Britain, it’s impossible to go anywhere without being spied upon. England has spend billions of pounds setting up the densest CCTV (close circuit TV) network in the world. Or perhaps I should say in the semi-free world, because I’d go odds that North Korea has a pretty good CCTV network too.
The goal behind all this spying was supposed to be crime reduction, with the thinking being that a perpetually watched population is an honest population. It turns out, though, that being spied upon not only doesn’t improve people’s honesty, it also doesn’t improve law enforcement’s ability either to prevent or prosecute crimes:
Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the Brits that the better infrastructure in which to have invested would have been a cultural and moral one: It would have started with abandoning multi-culti PC pap in favor of a vision of Brits as a unified people, regardless of country of origin. Then, one would layer over that a second vision of this unified people enjoying a shared Judeo-Christian value system, not a government welfare values system. If Britain had done that for the past decade or so, it might have ended up with a population in which people work hard and respect each other enough that, for the most part, they’re honest.
As it is, Brits now have a situation in which the government can’t protect them from each other, but it has positioned itself perfectly to spy on them in a way that would have made the rulers of George Orwell’s Oceania proud. I don’t know about you, but I’d be very unhappy living in a nation where the government never takes its eyes off me. After all this year’s ostensibly beneficent and manifestly inept government may be next year’s totalitarian tyrant.
