Hot on the heels of the unprecedented arrest of a Damian Green, a Member of Parliament, and the police raid on his Parliamentary office comes news of the imminent arrival of ID’s for every person on UK soil and a threat of *arrest* if ID is *not* presented on demand by the police!!
This move not seen in the UK since the fears of invasion at the time of World War Two is yet one more step in the accelerating march towards the Police State we were afraid of when Maggie Thatcher introduce her Police Bill. Even then those of us who’d read the Bill had concerns but it was passed by the Tory’s massive majority.
The anticipated erosion of civil liberty continued albeit at a slower pace until ‘Terrorism’ became the new watchword for society and the pace quickened one again. Not enough that the police had never needed these powers during the height of the IRA attacks on mainland UK when bombs killed and maimed people every few weeks… the ‘new threat’ was sufficient to allow the ‘Terror Bill’ through and the scene was set.
Comments such as this from Alan Travis, Clare Dyer and Michael White in The Guardian (Jan 28th 2005), went unheeded and the decline went on… all in the name of ‘Public Safety’ and ‘The Greater Good’ until now those creeping little effects are beginning to impact on the general public.
Local councils are spying on their ratepayers and issuing insane fines for trivial offences. Unwarranted police substitutes are banging heads and taking names. Ordinary citizens are being harassed continually while almost unchecked the collapse in law and order is seeing an unprecedented rise in assaults, murders on the street and an underclass of ‘disaffected and alienated youth’ with neither respect nor regard for the norms and mores of decent society.
Society in the UK is going to the dogs as police powers are expanding. Something is desperately wrong with old blighty and it’ll take a lot more than increased police powers to fix it.
Either way I hope anyone reading this in the UK is getting ready. Today ID cards… tomorrow you’ll have your ‘number’ tattooed on your ear… Orwell might have been a few years out but maybe substitute ‘2024’ for ‘1984’ and perhaps the decline of society in the UK will be complete.
What hurts most is that much of this decline has happened with a Labour Prime Minister at the helm. I wonder what it was that went so badly wrong??
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