Last year, in another place, we looked at whether Blair's Britain was meeting the criteria for tyranny as outlined by the author Naomi Wolf in her critique of the alleged growth in US executive powers over its citizens.

Our conclusion was that she was unduly alarmist in general but that, in the specific case of the UK, Blair's Government had introduced a significantly more authoritarian approach to governance. 

However, we believed (at that time) that the trend had peaked, simply because the State could not deliver the machinery required and the public were become increasingly resistant to more executive authority without adequate justification.

We referred to Britain as a 'one third tyranny' if measured by Wolf's listing of threats to liberty.  The arrival of Brown changed the tone of Government and internal security was no longer quite so 'in yer face' under Home Secretary Smith as it had been under Home Secretaries Clarke and Reid.

But we should never be complacent about increases in State power given the history of state terrorism against peoples, using the excuses of security, order, racial destiny and national economic development. How are things actually shaping up, over nine months from that earlier pre-Brown assessment?

Though we are always suspicious of special interest NGO reports, Privacy International ranks Britain only fractionally lower than Russia and China in terms of surveillance. If this is true, it is about time that we asked where this may be leading.

Whereas Russia and China are defending existing authoritarian economies from over-rapid external liberalization, the rise of surveillance in the UK is linked to the defence of a State suffering from over-rapid internal liberalisation.

The British State is trying to survive an anarcho-capitalist onslaught that is the direct result of its being first mover (in the 1980s) of the system that threatens to overwhelm it.

Between these two extremes – rising economies trying to manage what the Anglo-Saxons started and an Anglo-Saxon State being undermined by the monster it bred within itself – lies the rest of the world.

Judgements on state policy from Paris to Damascus will be partially led by the perceived ability of Moscow and Beijing to retain direction of their economies and societies and by London’s ability to restore control over its national culture and maintain social cohesion.

The Sunday Times [10 February] reviewed our ‘Russian-style’ surveillance systems and we thank it for its summary of facts (the opinions and ‘spin’ are ours). It seems that we have four main planks underpinning a system of social control that is only half-way to completion:-

• Targeted bugging and interception of calls, e-mails, letters and other communications

An MI5, MI6, Defence Intelligence, GCHQ, NCIS, HM Revenue & Customs or Chief Constable request for a warrant authorized by the Home Secretary can be made for reasons of ‘national security, to prevent a serious crime or to protect the economic well-being of the country' – this right to request also includes requests from overseas authorities engaged in “international mutual assistance”

• GCHQ – a vast and secret network of supercomputers embedded in the telecommunications systems.

This system is believed to be able to recognize voices and search for key words and locations.  The Secretary of State authorizes GCHQ to target communications only outside the UK but it is common knowledge (and certainly has never been denied) that GCHQ and the US NSA trade data to get around constitutional or political restrictions on monitoring one’s own citizens. Fear of losing access to NSA data may be a major constraint on any questioning of the Special Relationship by the security interest.

• Dataveillance – the search and cross-checking of data left in the system as we leave credit card and other material on computer databases

Senior officials, not only in the full panoply of the national state but also in the 474 local authorities and amongst over 100 other authorities, can authorize access to data communications. The Government is also already committed to vast new databases, including a nationwide NHS health records system and a child registration database called Contactpoint (opponents of conscription of youth to die in some African bush war in fifteen to twenty years' time, please note).

• CCTV cameras

There are now 4.2 million CCTV camera across the UK. The police now want a comprehensive automatic numberplate recognition system that will track you as you travel across the country and, of course, fuzzy pictures are increasingly less of a barrier because techniques for identification of individuals are constantly improving (the facial images national database should be available in 2009).

There were 1,333 warrants in the last nine months of 2006 which does not seem outrageous in the context of the growth of organized crime, but there is the let-out that senior officials and the police can pre-authorize surveillance (such as bugging and tailing) and then get it post-authorised and then signed off by the Office of Surveillance Commissioners.

Perhaps the most disturbing development, because highly randomized, is that the police have had the power, since 2003, to take and keep fingerprints and DNA samples from anyone arrested regardless of guilt or innocence.

6 million Britons are on a fingerprint database and 4.2m on DNA database. Both databases have assisted in solving crimes, including some important ‘cold cases’, but many innocent people are logged into a system that is two-tier and riddled with anomalies. 

The Government is terrified of universalising either system unless under cover of eventually bio-based ID cards. Unjust anomalies are considered acceptable.

This brings us naturally to the national identity register and to ID cards, initially popular but increasingly becoming the subject of a major back-lash, especially as trust levels in Government cannot be said to be high after a whole series of security and systems failure surrounding personal data. Those resident in the UK for three months or more will be required to register their details on a central database.

The technique in many of these cases is social control through stealth and it ties into other forms of social engineering – such as the switch from voluntary to ‘opt-out’ (effectively compulsory) organ donation. Some of these innovations have important interest groups calling for their implementation, unintentionally preparing the ground for the increasing socialisation of identity and even physical flesh across a much wider front.

In practice, passports and car licences identify most persons, though not all. Dataveillance and international intelligence sharing enables suspects (possibly domestic dissidents one day) to be tracked, monitored and their associations assessed and disrupted in operations that are now transnational. Biological data is slowly being built up through police databases and ultimately will be available through health service records.

The whole system now only requires the implementation and then extension of the identity card register and an increase in associated police and other executive powers to ensure complete control over the population ‘in an emergency’ - or to enforce a state-driven law obliging ‘service’ (such as relocation, repatriation, protective custody for groups rather than persons, conscription or, theoretically, forced labour).

The ideology of rights and responsibilities on the Right of New Labour is tailor-made for the eventual justification of socialised identity control and receives minimal challenge from either the Left or the Conservatives because it seems to be criticising Mum's home-made apple pie. In fact, it is philosophically unsound and riddled with threat to fundamental liberties.

There are some good rational arguments for the system, but nearly all of them are based on the idea that strong government is the only rational and safe response to the collapse of authority as a result of market modernization and globalization.

Nearly all of the arguments share with the national socialists and the national bolsheviks a belief that the vast majority of the population are reliable, bovine and manageable, but that State authority requires social control tools to deal with a recalcitrant 'minority'. 

This minority might be criminal or terrorist but it increasingly comes to include communities - like the underclass, 'yoof' or ethnic localities - who refuse to accept the prevailing consensus or offer a potential threat in the future in the eyes of the State.

Unfortunately, such minorities are the ones who ‘disappeared’ in the interwar period and later in Latin America in the 1970s with little knowledge and even some approval from the vast mass of the population, especially those with a stake in society.

The problem is that rational can soon be degraded to normal and normal to conventional and so to the imposition of a cultural uniformity that actively seeks to identify and then punish deviant behaviour. It is the triumph of the authoritarian personality in a society which requires more balance between human types.

Our natural fear of the system must be that those we trust prove untrustworthy (and there is sadly much evidence of that in history and, indeed, in the internal conduct of New Labour) or, worse, the trustworthy create and then leave behind a complex system of oppression that falls into the hands of much more sinister forces.

Imagine the whole surveillance state in the hands of the darker reaches of the BNP with the connivance of authoritarian personalities within the security services and you have a picture of Britain not dissimilar to the dystopian fantasy of Alan Moore's V for Vendetta - itself an outgrowth of the paranoia of dark times, easily forgotten, in the mid-1970s.

Of course, this is not the intention of any but the more loopy and more paranoid of security and intelligence types (though do not believe these are not to be found at lower and mid-levels in any such community). 

Current policies are, in fact, driven by fear rather than by ideology or rather by the negative ideology of trying to cope with the consequences of a failed globalization strategy.

In the short term, the offer to the public is rational enough – to improve healthcare, to identify and suppress organized crime, to end the massive cost to the taxpayer of benefits fraud (which fuels organized crime) and to ensure collection of the very limited tax take that the electorate will bear. Yes, there is a counter-terror aspect but this should not be taken out of context.

Although there is an issue with radical Islamist violence, this is second order to controlling less violent separationist tendencies within discontented ethnic communities (hence the storm over the Archbishop of Canterbury's comments on sharia law), the greater threats presented by organized crime under globalisation and the NATO-driven attempt to secure the boundaries of the West by containing potential support for insurgents overseas.

These are all more general breakdowns in order and are the real drivers for aggressive institutions of surveillance and associated social control mechanisms. They link the surveillance society to our NATO and international policing commitments.

These wider drivers are far too complicated and contentious to explain to the public. The authorities are certainly not very keen on a national debate about whether the free market and expensive (in lives and cash) actions to manage ‘failed’ states are worth the candle in terms of domestic social collapse and loss of liberties.

The general desperation within the State also means that an almost accidental social conservative agenda is emerging on the right of the centre-left. This might, elsewhere, work within a classic republican framework but it works against the instincts of a largely easy-going British public.

The British are quite prepared to emote in all directions on subjects like migrants, hanging and Princess Diana, but they are fundamentally resistant to restrictions on their right to consume and misbehave on terms that would be far less tolerable to dour Swedes, moralistic Americans or earnest Germans. This is where the Government flounders most.

Apart from increasing attempts to curb prostitution through diktat, we now have statements over such matters as immigrant inbreeding because of arranged marriages alongside attempts to dictate how civil servants use language to show ‘respect’ to Muslims.

Most of this (though not all) is well-meaning nonsense, but it gives the overall impression of a Government relying on exhortation, flagging up further restrictions on personal freedoms, certainly on freedoms of lifestyle choice, rather than develop policies that deal with the causes of social breakdown and certainly rather than face the economic choice aspects underlying that breakdown.

We have a degree of unrecognised continuity here between a foreign policy centred on preserving Western leadership amidst an anarchic globalizing economy, domestic policing concerned with trans-national criminality and with community threats to national cohesion, the surveillance society and increasingly idiotic moral exhortations to a population that long since ceased to trust government or even noticed it except as irritant or problem.

So are civil libertarians right to fear Government and the security-based surveillance society? Well, yes and no.

If the British State existed in the communications culture of the 1930s or even the 1970s, there would be very serious cause for concern. Such a state could be quickly and radically strengthened within closed national borders, moral exhortation could become engineered as national culture through the media - and people could disappear without trace without many in the middle classes noticing or perhaps caring very much.

In contrast, this new surveillance and security culture is emerging because the State is weak, not strong. It has completely lost control of the cultural agenda. 

If it is using both the methods of the 1930s and the new technologies, it is merely to try and claw power back. It has no initially malign intention but fails to realize how such tools might be used if borders closed and political authority was fully reinstituted (as is now beginning to be attempted) over the new technologies. How, in short, we could be 'Sinified'.

What we are seeing now is a cultural arms race between the State and the people. Social networking tools (despite rumoured CIA involvement) and global internet access, and their work-arounds, are in direct competition with State attempts to censor, control and limit potential for dissidence.

As always, the West is confused – it encourages the new technologies against (say) China, Iran, Russia and Syria, yet worries at the effects of that same technology on its own stability. Perhaps the most subversive organisation against nation-states is, indeed, the CIA for reasons not entirely understood by its own analysts.

In practice, the internet has the potential to increase social cohesion through self-organisation - an old anarchist dream come true – by emphasizing the ability to localize, emote, resist imposition, point out abuses and so on without requiring the State at all.

On another occasion, we may report on the anarchic successes in building a ‘cadre’ against an incompetent and unresponsive executive through a Facebook Group, but this is precisely the wrong sort of organisational model from an institutional State perspective 

So, on balance, we do have the serious potential for a sinister surveillance society that increases state power to levels that might mimic that of the 1930s. Certainly, it might give tools to contain and discredit dissidence (as is being done with non-violent Caliphate Islamists and may be done later with Welsh nationalists or a Southern taxpayers' revolt).

But this system can only become truly oppressive if censorship and control (including shut-off) of the new communications technologies becomes part of the web agenda.

It is this attack on web freedom that you should be looking out for and one reason that, for all the negative attitude to US Executive power overseas, the American people have in-built safeguards against the imposition of tyranny from within that we should envy in the UK and perhaps in Europe. It has nothing to do with the right to bear arms and everything to do with the right to organise outside the machinery of the Executive.

If the British State, or the European Union, and their security elites try to control free expression and thought in this new networking environment, then you have every reason to be paranoid. In the meantime, one is advised to adopt the precautionary principle.

Any programme of 'resistance' (if needed) would require a mix of demanding more transparency and accountability within the system, more national democratic controls on inter-state co-operation, more ring-fencing between separate data sets, increased personal ownership of the use of data and a reduction in the number of authorities (especially local government, which is asking for trouble in terms of competence and corruption) who are authorized to access various systems.

If by the time of the next election, probably in 2009/2010, moves have not been made in this direction, then libertarians, regardless of historical party allegiance, would have some justification in considering whether the current Party of State deserves their support.

Already, in partial response to these concerns, the Liberal Democrat Party, the somewhat unreliably most naturally libertarian party, has indicated its willingness to work with Cameron's Tory Party to promote 'liberal' policies.

A democratic socialist or liberal New Labour supporter may begin to wonder quite soon whether Liberal Democrat constraints on an increasingly liberalized Conservative Party offer the best safeguards to the population at large against the threat of all these many tools of a potential police state falling into the wrong hands in a crisis – and perhaps one day eating up our national young in some future 'dirty war'.

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