The Wardman Wire

I try and avoid non-value added blogging, but I have been covering this for 6 months already, so …

Andrew Rawnsley on Politics Home this morning following a question to their “Expert Panel 100″ panel:

Jacqui Smith is being cast as Big Brother - though perhaps that should be Big Mother - over plans to further extend the amount of information on citizens held by the state. The terrorism watchdog is one of those concerned with the idea of a database holding information about every phone call, email and internet visit.

The Home Secretary will go ahead regardless of strong opposition.

A big majority (seventy three per cent) of the politically balanced panel think that Ministers intend to proceed anyway. Only a small minority of the panel (seven per cent) think that there will not be strong opposition to the database scheme.

About a quarter of the panel (twenty six per cent) reckon the Government will drop the plan.

Comments from panellists are almost uniformly hostile to the proposal.

One panel member calls the plan ‘intrusive, illiberal and a waste of money.’

Another panellist remarks: ‘The Government is obsessed with this sort of stuff while people increasingly worry about their privacy and the Government’s true intentions.’

A third panel member reckons that Ministers are under pressure from the spooks: ‘It will proceed more slowly and tentatively than 42 days but security services are 100% behind this one so goverment can’t drop it.’

A fourth panellist rages: ‘The plan is mad, bad and dangerous, but that never seems to stop loony tune security ideas being pursued by Brown and Smith.’

A fifth panellist reckons everyone is laying blame in the wrong place: ‘It’s an EU requirement, so they have no choice.”

“Go ahead regardless of strong opposition”.

Sigh. It may or may not be an EU-requirement (that statement looks to me like a fig-leaf) and it may or may not be defined yet, but the EU is supposed to take member’s wishes into account, and they don’t have to go at it like a mini-me Mussolini high on drugs desperately trying to prove to Daddy that his totaliarian balls have dropped.

Just what do we have to do to stop these people?

Sorry, M’Luds. Another one you are going to have to sink for us.

At least we are nearly at the stage when the Lords can delay things until after the next election, and then there is at least a decent chance that Mr Cameron and his goverment (assuming he wins) will prove to be somewhat sane in the area of Big Brother government. I’m not happy that they will go far enough in dismantling the supervisory state, but almost anything would be better than this.

Perhaps Our Kingdom needs two further lists alongside their list of Lost Civil Rights. Firstly a list of Big Brother databases (start with the ID Card database, 90% of the police DNA database and the disfunctional “child-protection” hearsay gossip guilty-until-proved innocent database of a fifth of the population - no, not that one, this one.), and then another of repressive laws to be simply abolished since this country is supposed to believe in freedom.

[Update 17/10/2008 6pm: There are reports that the Govt will drop the database but Mr Hoon the Transport Secretary is defending it.

Jacqui Smith is making a point of denying that they will put content - recordings of phone calls etc - in the database. This is both a standard New Labour smokescreen cum non-denial denial and a bait and switch: they were never going to put content in it; the issue is about the existence of a centralised automatically collected database. We need to keep the focus on the story.

Update 17/10/2008 7pm: Further thought. Jacqui Smith may be making her denials for the purpose of rebutting allegations that they are planning a database of communications contents. It still looks like a very suspiciously specific denial, and their record is one of manipulating the media, the politics, Parliament and the public in exactly this way.]