Near the end of his article Blair laid bare, Henry Porter defers to the thoughts of Simon Davies, a fellow at the London School of Economics, who did pioneering work on the ID card scheme and then suffered a wounding onslaught from the Government when it did not agree with his findings. The worrying thing, he suggests, is that the instinctive sense of personal liberty has been lost in the British people. "We have reached that stage now where we have gone almost as far as it is possible to go in establishing the infrastructures of control and surveillance within an open and free environment," he says. "That architecture only has to work and the citizens only have to become compliant for the Government to have control.

"That compliance is what scares me the most. People are resigned to their fate. They've bought the Government's arguments for the public good. There is a generational failure of memory about individual rights. Whenever Government says that some intrusion is necessary in the public interest, an entire generation has no clue how to respond, not even intuitively And that is the great lesson that other countries must learn. The US must never lose sight of its traditions of individual freedom." [bold emphasis mine]

Unfortunately, the U.S. is in the same boat. If it makes me sound like a conspiracy nut, so be it, but to my mind, the many parallels between Bush's and Blair's policies are evidence of a coordinated plan.
Kat | 06.30.06 - 5:48 pm | #