Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I'm just back from a short trip to New York. I hope to write something about the Obama phenomenon. On the plane back with Tony Curzon Price we were reflecting on the hyper-sexualisation of girls in Britain and whether this should be a theme for OurKingdom (From 'No Sex please we are British', to 'Sex please we're British', to 'And you can drop the "please"'). Is it linked to the growing hysteria of politics in this country and is this exceptional as Eurostats suggest it is, or not - Sarkozy Burlusconi? Let us know what you think. Well, I opened the papers to find them in another bout. What are our leaders afraid of? Not the Sun, not still?
Apparently the leader of the Conservative Party told the Sun
This is a moment in our history when we have to wake up, sit up and have massive social, political and cultural change
He makes it sound like an ejaculation. Only one that is painful and not a pleasure. Perhaps the example of Barack has blown David's mind.
The paper headlined his interview Police, Cameron, Action and Downing Street went into paroxysms of jealousy.
Amidst all this loss of nerve there is a welcome column from Timothy Garton Ash denouncing the database state and calling on everyone to support No2ID. He joins the gang of us who have declared that we will not carry an ID card. But perhaps he hasn't read OK closely enough. For as Jon Bright perceptively pointed out some time ago New Labour's strategy will be to not make the card compulsory but create the database anyway. Tim reports something I didn't know which demonstrates the link between the current attempt to lengthen detention without charge to 42 days and wider forms of state control and surveillance:
Meanwhile, the government has just laid before parliament its latest counter-terrorism bill. Besides the notorious proposal to increase the period of detention without charge to 42 days, this includes provisions that, as the attached official notes explain, allow anyone to give information to the intelligence services "regardless of any duty to keep the information private or of any other restriction" (other than those mentioned in a pair of elastic subclauses). Such information can then be shared or disclosed by that service more or less at will.
As Tim says, "This will not do". He then adds a hopeful point,
and even the staunchest supporters of the smack of firm government are beginning to say as much. The Daily Mail, that prince of firm-smackers, yesterday ran a leading article which concluded that "Under this government - of whom the Stasi would have been proud - the balance between state power and individual liberty has been outrageously skewed. It must be restored." This is something on which press and politicians of left and right are beginning to agree.
Not if that press belongs to Rupert Murdoch. The pump and engine room of hysteria wants strong, intrusive, state power while living off the atmosphere of fear, prurience and sexism it itself creates.
