Prison Britain

In the British spy-spoof film Johnny English, John Malkovich’s character Pascal Sauvage schemed to become the next king so that he could turn Britain into an island prison. As ridiculous and implausible as the film’s plot seems, the fiction of Britain becoming a prison nation is getting closer to reality with each passing moment due to the continuing nightmare of New Labour (or the ‘Nulabs’ if you prefer) in high office.

Over the previous decade, the Nulabs have deliberately and gradually curtailed and stripped the civil liberties of the British people in a series of what can only be termed as salami slices. The Nulabs have reinterpreted pre-1997 legislation to be harsher than originally intended and imposed additional and further repressive measures such as biometric identity cards and the life-long retention of DNA samples from police suspects who have subsequently been cleared of any wrongdoing. The Nulabs have also targeted certain specific groups of people for repression, all on the pretext of either responding to public opinion or protecting the public from outside forces, internal malcontents and even themselves. The War on Terror has made Muslims and Arabs a premier target for the Nulabs with the introduction of greater powers of detention without trial and repressive control orders that play on the public’s otherwise understandable fears about the growth of Islamofascism. The young, like Arabs and Muslims are another easy target for the Nulabs due to the thuggery of a prominent minority, with the creation of ASBOs. Even those who have an autistic spectrum disorder such as Asperser’s Syndrome are to be treated as untrustworthy individuals who are almost genetically predisposed to be guilty of criminal conduct as is disgracefully implied by the Nulabs’ proposed new mental health legislation.

Now the elderly are the Nulabs’ latest target for increased state surveillance when the science minister argued for the old to be tagged like criminals to make it easier to find should some of them get lost outside their homes and family circles. This attitude towards our senior citizens is both arrogant and insensitive; it is in effect a call to criminalise old age and turn it into a social evil. How long will it be before the Nulabs bring in legislation to introduce compulsory euthanasia at 30 as occurred in the film Logan’s Run?

However, the biggest crime imaginable within the Nulabs’ prison nation is to have a private life. The biggest implication of the Nulabs’ assault on our civil liberties is the impending abolition of privacy. Identity cards, control orders, pre-emptive detention of autism sufferers, ABSOs and tagging the elderly are designed to allow the state to snoop in on and interfere in our lives because they both despise and cannot trust us to conform to the will of the political elite and do what they want us to do without the stick of compulsion. ASBOs are particularly repulsive because they have created another tier of criminal ‘law’ with lower, more arbitrary standards of proving guilt. Gossip is now given the same level of credibility as evidence and eyewitness testimony. The way ABSOs work is chillingly similar to how the Nazi Gestapo conducted itself during the era of the Third Reich in that the Gestapo acted primarily on the words of individuals who wanted to settle scores with a rival or adversary that they held ill will against. This and the Nulabs’ other actions against the British public are contrary to our traditions and principles such as the assumption of innocence until guilt is proved beyond reasonable doubt and the innate rights to privacy, to make our own decisions and live as we see fit so long as we are aware of the consequences of our actions.