Oliver Huitson. All rights reserved.
The British government’s new Investigatory Powers Bill, colloquially known as the Snoopers Charter, gets its first reading in the Commons on November 4th. The spooks are engaging in a massive attempt to soften up opinion, as Henry Porter shows in the Observer. This is a critical moment for liberty in the UK and because of its central location in the US dominated surveillance system, perhaps globally too.
One thing that strikes me after returning from a month in the United States is how backward and stupefyingly complacent public awareness is in this country compared to America. It would be hard to find a better example than a recent Financial Times column by Janan Ganesh. Aghast that the expected patriotic thrill of going to see the latest James Bond film has been punctured, by a storyline of Spectre capturing ‘C’ and thus subverting “the most British thing” about James Bond – that our agents are “benign”, Ganesh can hardly control his prose. He feeds his small-minded reaction into the espresso machine and pumps it up with froth, creating a column that reads like an application for Trevor Kavanagh’s place in the Sun. The FT used to be a home for argument of substance. Instead, certainly in this case, Ganesh crows that no one listens to liberals and civil libertarians here. In this sturdy land a people confident in their security forces and happy with the state ignores all such hand wringing. The argument hardly matters, opinion settles all and makes protest pointless.
