Once, Britain viewed itself as the cradle of democracy and home of freedom and civil rights. Even then it was probably a false impression, but in recent years it has really become ludicrous.

Today, on the Radio news bulletins there has been a few items about how the police are trying to get online video sharing services (i.e. YouTube) to prohibit people uploading video of themselves driving dangerously or excessively speeding. The articles finished off with an ominous threat that if it wasn’t banned, the government would be pressured into making it illegal.

I am confused.

Driving dangerously is an offence. Driving along the road holding a mobile phone in one hand to record both your speedometer and the road ahead is illegal. Breaking the speed limit is illegal. What difference will making a new law have? What advantage is there in creating a new law in our already burgeoning system?

In our current Orwellian-Britain, it is almost a daily occurrence for the tabloids to scream about how antisocial behaviour is out of control and call for “more, tougher laws” to curb it. Our intellectually lazy public laps this up and as a result our offensively fickle politicians (as well as the politically minded Chief Police Officers) pick up on this and agree we need new laws to make XYZ illegal. No one seems to notice the sheer madness of criminalising more and more behaviour, then complaining about more and more criminals…

Add to this, the weird idea that people seem to have about handing over more of our civil liberties to the police and you can see we are truly on the road to 1984. If you are in doubt about the weirdness then have a look at the BBC “Have your say” from Wednesday, 30 Jan 08. Titled “Will more stop and search powers reduce crime” it carries the following blurb:

The government is to announce an extension of stop and search powers for police to enable them to stop people without grounds for suspicion, the BBC understands. Will this help the police?

The government has been trialling routine stop and search powers for police in so-called gun and knife “hotspots” but the powers could shortly be extended to other parts of the country.

The Conservatives are also promising a major overhaul of police powers to stop and search suspects, with police being allowed to radio in the personal details of who they have stopped.

Rightfully, there is a mix of comments for and against the powers so I wont go into too many of them but this was one typical of the “tabloid-Britain” point of view:

In London it should reduce the number of youngsters carrying knives so it must be a good thing!

Wow. Working on the assumption that something may happen justifies the injustice. Amazing.

The very concept of stop and search without requiring even the farcical “reasonable suspicion” of the past is mind blowing. This legislation, is passed, would allow the police to randomly stop anyone they wanted and search them to see if they are carrying anything illegal or, worryingly, anything the officer feels may assist with a criminal act. This definition is very broad brush – a screwdriver can be considered in all manner of ways… Even more disturbingly, the new legislation seeks to remove the “paperwork” which accompanies current stop and searches. Quite rightly most police officers dislike having to spend time filling in forms explaining who they have stopped and under what grounds the stop was carried out – however, by taking away that paperwork there is no longer any protection of the innocent person who has been subjected to police harassment.

I am sure that 99.9% of police officers are fine, upstanding members of the community and have no goal but the greater good of society. However, there are a lot of police officers so that 0.01% represents a lot of “bad eggs.” When these officers decide to stop people because of their skin colour, or their dress or whatever and continue to stop a minority of people there is (currently) a system in place where the citizen has a record of the stop and evidence of excessive stops can be presented to the authorities. Removing that removes a vital safeguard for both the public and the police officer.

Are the British people so ignorant of our recent history that we wilfully refuse to acknowledge any of its lessons? I could understand it if we were talking about issues which happened 500 years ago, but in my lifetime we have seen the problems caused by internment, lack of police accountability, criminalisation of a segment of society based on nothing but their religion (etc). Over the last 30 years we should have learned that this sort of thing encourages people to turn to violence to make themselves heard or to get “restitution” for police oppression (real or otherwise). Did we learn nothing from Londonderry, Toxteth, Brixton, Belfast…

As an answer we have this bit of madness (comment on the BBC have your say page) which encapsulates the “average British person” and their point of view (if the media is anything to go by):

Stop and search is necessary, whilst crime continues.

What we have in Britain is the lunatics running the assylum.
we have already given in to many of the lunatics request for leniency. and what has improved in the last 30 years ?
Nothing thats what.

Forget all the figures about the crime rate being down.
most crimes now go unreported.
In any society, we need control.
we cannot have unelected voices demanding a change in law.

If you cant stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

No, it doesn’t make any sense to me either. Crime will be with us (and every other culture) for as long as humanity survives. Most crimes do not go unreported (prove they do and I will be impressed). The bit about changes to the law really threw me and I gave up on this genius. Sadly, this is a tone which you can find on nearly all the national newspapers and pretty much every Television channel. Will the politicians be swayed by this?