From Mr Bean to Mr Has-Been?

So Gordon Brown has got his 42 days, but only thanks to the pristinely selfless and patriotic votes of the Ulster Democratic Unionists.

This humiliating "victory" may prove to have been won at too high a price. There's a well-known saying that one of the risks of asking for what you want is that you might get it. This could well turn out to be true not only of tonight's vote, but of Brown's entire long-coveted premiership.

If I were a Labour MP, I would be seething tonight whichever way I had voted.

What goes around, comes around.

A timely cock-up

The glum faces on the Treasury bench at today’s Prime Minister’s Question Time spoke volumes, as Bruiser Brown floundered under the taunts of his bantam-weight Conservative and LibDem opponents. The Prime Minister’s honeymoon is well and truly over, and he increasingly comes across as boastful, bothered, and inept. 25 million personal confidential records have gone astray, and all Brown can muster is a tepid apology for the “inconvenience”[!], while protesting that there was no systemic failure – just a slip-up by an incompetent junior, and the error was, like the Victorian maidservant’s baby, just a little one.

This, coupled with £25 billion of public money being shovelled in to shore up the reckless banking practices of Northern Rock, constitutes the writing on the wall for this increasingly tired and clueless administration. But will it deter control-freak Brown from his hot pursuit [egged on by the Sun, and so presumably with Rupert Murdoch’s blessing] of a national identity card data base and the amassing of yet more personal data which spells the end of personal privacy as we have hitherto known it in Britain? That is, I fear, unlikely.

Last weekend a few – too few - journalistic voices sounded the alarm at the continuing governmental rape of our freedoms. In the Observer, Henry Porter said: “Welcome to Fortress Britain…a state that requires you to answer 53 questions before you’re allowed to take a day trip to Calais. Welcome to a country where you will be stopped, scanned and searched at any of 250 railway stations, filmed at every turn, barked at by the police…There is no end to Whitehall’s information binge…In a few years’ time…there will be very little the state won’t be able to find out about you. And because this is a government database, there will be huge numbers of mistakes that will lead to suspicion and action being taken against innocent people.” A prophetic forecast in view of today’s stunning news, following hard on the heels of the revelation that thanks to Home Office ineptitude, upwards of 10,000 ‘security guards’ may be illegal immigrants.

More sinisterly, Porter reveals that the £1.2 billion cost of this Big Brother operation – which WE, the taxpayers, will have to stump up – is largely going into the pocket of Raytheon Systems, a US company that developed the Cruise missile “and which, no coincidence, has embedded itself in Labour’s information project by supporting security research at the party’s favourite think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research.”

In The Times, Simon Jenkins castigates Brown as “a tentative, uncertain leader, reluctant to confront admirals, bankers, property developers, American presidents, and now his own security apparatus.” The public realm, says Jenkins, “is being medievalised at the bidding of Osama bin Laden. We are witnessing a drift towards banana republicanism, towards regimes that survive on perpetual states of emergency, in thrall to some bullying police chief or paranoid spymaster. This is not responsible government.”

And in the Telegraph, Jenny McCartney forecasts a ‘Shambles Britain’, in which the dull threat of terror hangs permanently in the air, making every journey a nightmare.

Finally, a newly released DVD, Taking Liberties, rehearses the successive encroachments on traditional civil liberties perpetrated by the Blair/Brown ‘New Labour’ government since 9/11: infringements of the right to protest, the right to freedom of speech, the right to privacy, the right not to be detained without charge, the right to be deemed innocent until proven guilty, and the right not to be tortured, or handed over for torture by others.

We live in perilous times and, as in the 1930s, find that our personal and private lives – which are the most important and precious aspects of our existence – are increasingly encroached upon and disrupted by the outside world.

Of all the threats – terrorism, international military and economic lawlessness, the spectre of nuclear attacks, religious and cultural conflict, ecological meltdown – by far the most immediate and menacing is this onslaught by our own government upon the historic civil liberties which, until this opening decade of the 21^st century, British citizens assumed had been finally won and could be taken for granted.

One crucial aspect of this, which is hardly ever mentioned, is the competence and integrity of the faceless super-snoopers who will police all this mountain of data. As Jenkins points out, “Whitehall’s 450 counterterrorism officials [doing what all day?] are to be reinforced with hundreds more to run courses on terrorist detection for all staff in cinemas, theatres, hotels and shopping centres.” And quite junior civil servants [including illegal immigrants?] will be charged with the juicy task of monitoring all our movements and communications – including our phone calls and emails – to sniff out suspicious behaviour. Well, as we have just seen, junior – and senior? - civil servants are more than likely to make monumental mistakes.

I do not like the putrid smell of this panicky government. Nor, I hope, do you. It is all too reminiscent of the Stasi-policed East German regime, where no-one knew who was a friend and who was a government spy.

I have always believed much more in the cock-up theory of politics than in the paranoid conspiracy version. Yes – sinister and unsavoury people in powerful positions DO cook up schemes to disadvantage and rip off the long-suffering public – but the real danger and evil of the ‘surveillance society’ is that it is bound to be not only corrupt, but crassly incompetent in crucial respects, and so it is actually no protection against terrorism or any other danger.

It’s time for us all to wake up, before we sleepwalk into a post-1984 Orwellian world.

Security threats and risk assessment

Another very good site here, with lots of useful links.