Big Brother isn't watching you

Over at Spiked! the last resting place for ageing RCP supporters, Brendan O'Neil gives his views on the 'surveillance' society. It is a take that I wouldn't disagree with much (see 'Technology Lies' below) but where I don't agree is when he writes, "In truth, the real driving force behind the surveillance society is not a practical one at all; it is a political one. It is underpinned by an existential crisis, if you like, by a powerful and palpable sense amongst government officials that they are increasingly cut off and disconnected from the public. The surveillance and database society is an attempt by officialdom to reconfigure a relationship with the public, to engender a direct, functional relationship to replace the political, citizenship-based relationship that has eroded in recent years. "

Firstly, what's all this 'citizen-based relationship' we once enjoyed with the Labour Government? They treated us all like scum for the most part - from the trains, to the hospitals, to the war our voices were blithely ignored and sniggered at behind closed doors. If that relationship has eroded in recent years - so much the better.

Secondly, is it really possible to imagine Gordon Brown or Jack Straw having an 'existential crisis'? These are today's politicians who, by nature, don't think about profound philosophical issues. The nature of contemporary politics is to leave everything to the market - why bother to pause and think about it? As for philosophy and deep thought - that doesn't pay the shareholders and so isn't an option. The crises that face the Labour Party are far more serious than than some dope induced panic attack, of course. So this part of O'Neil's argument just doesn' convince. He is right, though, to argue that ministers are "cut off and disconneted from the public".

But how is that news? That was the point of the whole Blairite project all along if the 'public' is anyone with the remotest connection to the party's 'base'. Blair wasn't a moderniser in that sense. He maintained the backward nineteenth century looking ideals of his real predecessor. He wanted to continue Thatcher's returning of British politics back to the élite and its practitioners - the 'true governance class' - and eradicate any democratic forces that would hold this project up. The beneficiaries of this whole tedious process have been , of course, the businessmen and shareholders whose principles ultimately direct the path of British politics.

Thus the idea that all these cctv cameras are some attempt to re-engage with the British public has to be some sort of ironic gag. O'Neil has taken the wrong turn here. He should cherchez l'argent. It is not a political crisis but an economic one. According to research recently fabricated by myself, I can reveal that the sureillance industries at the centre of this current boom all have financial links with the ministers involved. You read it here first. O'Neil does say that to argue that they don't work or aren't manned is to "miss the point" and that the cameras are 'totems. . . symbols of government interaction in our daily, public lives". Sounds plausible enough, but once you start to introduce terms like 'symbolic' and 'totem' into your argument, your argument goes the same way. After all, the government intervenes enough in radically unsymbolic ways in our lives a lot of the time without sticking symbols up about it - try signing on.

The fact that the ugly cameras don't help reduce crime and that there is nobody to watch the reams of thouroughly meaningless and boring copy is, in a way, beside the point. There's money to be made - at the taxpayers' expense and that's the real point. It is there where the real scandal of all this cctv hooha lies and not in some existential crisis - for which, anyway, you would have to be a human being to experience one. . .

So, go on, nick it, chuck a brick through a window or slap a copper or something - there's no one watching.