Resistance is Phutile

Is democracy in danger of destroying our liberty?

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That was the question Peter Hitchins was asking in his Dispatches programme on Saturday. Warning of the dangers to our civil liberties posed by an increasingly political style of policing, Hitchins set out to put the fear of Big Brother into us quicker than any early morning footage of Pete Burns ever did. Unfortunately, however, the programme fell considerably short of its aims.

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The case of Maya Evans was admittedly a good opener. A protester arrested in October last year for reading out the names of those in the British military who have been killed in Iraq, Evans was taken in under the Serious and Organised Crimes Act of the same month. Hitchins noted the irony of the situation with something approaching gleeful opportunism. Here, next to the Cenotaph, where those who died to protect our freedoms are celebrated, an innocent exerciser of those freedoms is carted off by the thought police. I found myself imagining the heroes of the past catching a glimpse of a grim future where the liberties they were fighting to uphold were thrown away by the leaders of their very own country. Opportunistic or otherwise, the point was well made.

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Even the story of Matthew Dodd, a trainspotter subjected to a public strip search by the British Transport Police, was still on the right track (sorry for the pun).

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But here the programme began to degenerate. As a natural sceptic of the I.D card and somebody who feels genuine anxiety about the stripping away of civil liberties I really wanted to agree with everything Hitchins said. But questioning whether people in police custody under arrest should have samples of their DNA taken was not going to win any converts to Hitchins' line of thinking. Having been arrested and subjected to DNA sampling in the past, I can testify that no unjust consequences have ever come back to haunt me. While I would argue strongly against the cultivation of the national DNA database that is being engineered by the government, it can only be logical that once a person has been caught committing a crime, they have their DNA sampled and held on record for a length of time appropriate according to the offence. Of course, if the police were to arrest somebody for voicing a particular opinion, however disagreeable it may be, there could be no justification for DNA swabbing.

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Hitchins shifted his attention to CCTV. Again an area worthy of debate, ASBO TV is very much a worrying development in the population monitoring activities of the state. Yet while the prospect of a suspicous, paranoid populous abandoning the streets in favour of watching them through a screen, in order to observe the hooded Children Of The Apocalypse* happy slap each other to oblivion, is enough to spark contention, can anyone really doubt CCTV's value as a whole? What about all the violent criminals whose capture is made possible by surveillence networks?

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While maintaining a healthy suspicion of government activity in general and biometric recorded surveillence of the poulation in particular, I think what this programme really achieved was to serve as a reminder not to get carried away by one's own agenda, blindly dismissing anything and everything those in positions of power do as some sort of conspiratorial manoeuver aimed at achieving world enslavement.