In not allowing the electorate to be properly informed on government Covid19 policy, the Prime Minister is breaking the first rule of democracy. Are there now – at the eleventh hour – signs that other governance stakeholders are are demanding an end to secrecy, surveillance and censorship?
Secrecy
Contemporary styles of government in the US, UK and EU are, without question, at the stage before what we used to call ‘Kremlin Watching’ in the 1960-85 period. There was an excellent example in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph on “why” the UK Prime Minister has U-turned yet again and ordered Lockdown2. Here are two telling extracts:
Two points here: who told him, and why did he accept this given the last “expert” prediction was so wrong?
My immediate reaction is that here we have a lazy, frightened senior politician lacking the courage to accept the risk….and unwilling to listen to the sanity of his Chancellor. The second extract confirms our worst fears:
Note the propagandic use of the word ‘scientific’ there, minus only how the model has arrived at this startling conclusion.
Accountability is important. We’re not being told who wrote the model’s software, and what its assumptions are. We can’t know that until Boris goes to the House of Commons and gives us a name – and a full disclosure in writing of the model’s form. We assume it is Professor Ferguson still in charge. We wonder why. Parliament must demand to know, and then rise to the occasion
Number Ten will doubtless have more “speed is of the essence” excuses to put us off. We should ignore them.
Surveillance
A year ago, the local Mairie here gave me a digital-ray key to open the non-recycling part of the rubbish collection. The cost of being able to chuck away one’s decaying food and endless packaging has always been included in local taxes. It all seemed a waste of money to me, but I didn’t pay attention.
At the start of the new fiscal year, I got a robot-generated letter from the Mayor saying that – as visits to the food dump were only free for the first fifteen occasions – I’d used it twenty-four times, and thus owed them €27.
So I threw the key away in disgust (how dare they not mention this new charge and monitor my trash behaviour?) and now have alternative arrangements for disposing of unhygienic ordures.
Last week, cameras appeared at the rubbish dump, along with notices to inform me that Grand Frère was watching. So they obviously think citizens are bunging cooking waste into the recycling chambers….which are still “free”.
Slowly-slowly catchy Monkey….or what I’ve come to regard as, “But it’s only a” syndrome.
If the only way that Homo sapiens socialis can be coaxed into obeying hidden taxes and (for God’s sake, disposal of waste rules) is by sharp practice and snooping, then imagine what those In Charge hahaha have in store for us when it comes to slightly bigger issues than chicken bones and fish-skin.
Yes, fine – I know this is sample of one stuff, but to paraphrase, “Enormous and omnivorous killer-dinosaurs from small eggs do grow”.
Censorship
Here we have something now that isn’t so much a case of ‘where to start’ as ‘where will it end?’
Last week I posted on WordPress – allegedly a “free” blogging service run by folks in the White Hats – a satirically surreal piece about “correct” political madness. This included references to two openly homosexual male politicians.
On pressing the ‘Publish’ button, I was only slighty suprised to see a panel come up asserting, “This platform does not support such content. Please remove it and try again”.
The offending paragraph contained several references to slang expressions for those men of a homosexual bent, if you will pardon the expression. It ran as follows:
Having used a page capture png file this time, I’m hopeful that the prosthetic intelligence involved will now let it through. But this is hardly the point.
I am entitled to the opinion that glorifying gay men behaviours is not much of a basis for either a stable or tolerant society. In the same way, I am entitled to the opinion that Boris Johnson is an obese sociopath, that Hillary Clinton is censoriously illiberal, and artifical intelligence is useless except as a tool of control freaks with little or no humanity on board.
Privatised censorship via social media and internet platforms has acted as a catalyst in the manner of all such ill-considered things: a deregulated expansion of the market.
This is what I think to be a realistic equation based on the evidence of history:
Perhaps, therefore, we should be heartened by this page capture from the latest Daily Telegraph website lead this afternoon:
Maybe – just maybe – the tide is turning.
The Slog 