Paranoid, suspicion, obsessive surveillance – and a land of liberty destroyed by stealth


Henry Porter writes in the Daily Mail about the rise of the Database State:

Labour is also behind a flurry of new databases that either leech personal information from each one of us or require innocent members of the public to go through an endless rigmarole of proving themselves to the state.

The scale of this project is vast. ‘The state and its agencies are amassing increasing quantities of data about its citizens,’ writes Jill Kirby, the director of the Centre for Policy Studies, in a recent pamphlet.

She lists them as including the DNA database, centralised medical records and the children’s database Contact-Point. This data, she says, has ‘proliferated to levels previously unseen in peacetime Britain’.

An institutionalised pessimism has taken over. The clear message of Government is that we are incapable of managing our lives and must be watched and regulated by ministers and civil servants from dawn to dusk.

Earlier this year, I calculated from published figures that Britain’s expenditure on databases and surveillance systems would amount to a staggering £32 billion.