Tony Blair has turned Britain into a land where we are all prisoners
by Chris Atkins
Even George Orwell would be shocked. He described the sinister machinations of a totalitarian police state in his novel, 1984, and laid bare the danger of eroding our basic civil liberties, including the right to freedom of speech and the right to privacy.
Although he famously coined the phrase ‘Big Brother is watching you’, even Orwell cannot have foreseen just how prescient those words would prove to be.
Today, in Tony Blair’s Britain – which I naively voted into power ten years ago – we have witnessed a breath-taking erosion of civil liberties.
The truth is we are fast becoming an Orwellian state, our every movement watched, our behaviour monitored, and our freedoms curtailed.Between May 1997 and August 2006, New Labour created 3,023 new criminal offences – taking in everything from a law against Polish potatoes (the Polish Potatoes Order 2004) to one which made the creation of a nuclear explosion in Britain officially illegal.
Then there has been the incredible number of CCTV cameras – a total of 4.2 million, more than in the rest of Europe put together.
And, yesterday, we learnt that the Government has agreed to let the EU have automatic access to databases of DNA (containing samples of people’s hair, sperm or fingernails) in order to help track down criminals, even though many thousands of those on record are totally innocent.
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