For pities sake stop referencing 1984 whenever a government does or is reported to do anything you don’t like. Especially if it has anything to do with cameras. It is so damned cliched now it no longer marks you (if it ever did) as a intelligent and witty individual opposing government tyranny. Quite the opposite in fact because when you do it you just look like a pseudo-intellectual douche-bag. Why because 1984 has quite a specific setting that we are nowhere near replicating. Why? Because in 1984 it is the minority middle classes that are subjugated by the upper classes to prevent revolution. It works on the premise that revolution is always started by the Bourgeoisie. The working class masses are pretty much left to their own devices. In modern Britain half the damned country is now middle class and it is the middle classes who actually run the damned country. Whenever anyone comes up with a hair-brained scheme involving CCTV it is always to protect the middle class from the criminal elements of the evil, chavy working  (I use the term loosely as not all of them actually work) classes. That is not the situation in 1984! We are no more close to the situation in 1984 than we are to that in ‘Brave New World’. Which in my opinion is the better damned book.

Of course those people referencing 1984 and ‘Big Brother’ would know all this if they had watched a film version of it or even read the bloody book. But most of them haven’t. Their knowledge of ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Room 101′ comes purely from pop culture osmosis. Though I guess I should credit the ones who actually now the source of the TV shows name with some level of general knowledge.

What is worse is that most people run around Chicken Licken screaming ‘Big Brother! 1984!’ after reading some supposed new government policy in a newspaper like the Daily Mail or Daily Express. If you actually take the time to investigate the story one of two things turn out to be true. 1) The newspaper flat out made it up or 2) It was suggested in passing by a non-governmental think tank or minor civil servant. So basically it was never going to happen in the first place. You got suckered by the gutter press into doing what makes sell more papers. There is nothing going at the moment that puts us anywhere near the slippery slope that would lead to a 1984 like situation. CCTV is not Big Brother. Until government vans come to your house to install a CCTV camera in your front room you can’t claim 1984. And despite what The Daily Mail and the like would have you believe this is never going to happen, ever. If nothing else their isn’t a large enough workforce to watch 25 million cameras or enough hard drives available to store all the footage. Hell a high ranking MET police offer has all but declared CCTV mostly useless as they don’t have the man power to make proper use of the CCTV cameras they already have. So Big Brother is not watching, he hasn’t the time.

On a side note if photographers can argue they can take pictures of whomever they wish in a public place because you should have no expectation of privacy in public then so can the government with CCTV. Likewise the government shouldn’t be doing it damnedest to criminalise photographers when it wants to use CCTV as a crime prevention tool. However that is another issue all together.

We are not on the verge of 1984 at all and the British government is not using it as an instruction manual. Have any of your friends/family gone missing for an extended period of time and then returned behaving out of sorts and saying how wonderful Gordon Brown is? No of course not. And if they have it probably has more to do with recreational drug use than Big Brother. Stop the scare mongering as it prevents proper rational discussion when the government does appear to overstep its boundaries. It makes it easy to dismiss objectors of some of their real hair-brained and illegal schemes as paranoid wackos who don’t really know what they are talking about. If anything the worlds of ‘V for Vendetta’ and ‘Brazil’ are far more likely but I guess they just don’t have the cultural clout.

And stop using term ‘Nanny State’ because you can no longer go up to people in pubs and blow foul smelling smoke and carcinogens into their faces. It makes you sound like a Daily Mail reader and we all know the only humane thing to do to them is euthanasia.