Identity and violence

To reach our favoured diving destination in Timor-Leste we drive past the President's house, which entails passing through checkpoints at either end of the winding road cutting into a steep hill from the beach.  Security is understandably tight here, particularly since last year's assassination attempt on the President, while he was taking a walk on the beach.  The checkpoints are guarded by Pakistani soldiers, who are smart, well-spoken and studiously polite.  When we were first asked for our ID, we explained that, as British subjects we did not possess ID cards. The soldiers seemed to accept this as reasonable explanation and we were waved through the barrier.  Since then we are always allowed through the checkpoint with a cheerful smile,  our unimpeachable ruddy-cheeked Britishness seemingly rendering us immune from identity checks, as if we were Sahibs on the Khyber Pass in the heyday of the Raj.  

I was reflecting on this pragmatic approach to preventative security (in the context of a still unstable and fairly volatile country where real threats to peace exist) whilst reading the reports of how the UK police goes about its business.   It seems that in recent months protesters have been filmed, monitored and most recently beaten up, simply for exercising what used to be a legitimate right of protest.  Meanwhile increasingly draconian laws proscribe certain actions just in case they may be suspicious (such as photographing policemen, or as an Austrain tourist discovered, snapping Vauxhall bus station.  

It now seems routine for policemen to remove their badge numbers when donning riot gear, apparently so they may not be identified as the wielders of intemperate fists or wild batons in the ensuing melee.  Before the widespread use of mobile phone cameras and CCTV such modesty on the part of the police was not deemed necessary.  Interestingly I always understood that a police uniform is not complete without the numbers on the shoulder, so I guess this is something else that has changed while we have been living abroad.  Police procedures have gone the way of proper Marmite jars and large newspapers - swept aside by the tide of modernisation.  Will we get to the stage where members of public must account for themselves, and show ID cards to prove their identity, whilst police officers are allowed to be anonymous?  

How ironic that the surveillance society, designed to make us safer while relieving police officers of the tedium of being 'bobbies on the beat', with all the tiresome interaction with the public that such drudgery entails, should now have caused all of us - including the police - to reflect on the meaning of 'identity'.  Our identity can only be of relevance to the police if they have some means of matching intelligence about us to our ID number.  Some kind of 'database' in fact.  This means that our 'identity' will, in official eyes at least, be assembled from observations and tracked movements through checkpoints.  We will become 'coal depot protest man' or 'anti-capitalism woman', and such factoids will be fed into a massive computer in order to predict behaviour.  I can imagine a situation where people are rounded up and arrested before a demonstration even takes place, which is just one step closer to a country where people are arrested before they have even thought about demonstrating.   

So the concomitant of ID cards is a database, and the presence of a database means that someone at a computer terminal will know more about you than you know yourself.  You may even get arrested for your own protection, because you were thinking of taking up smoking or cycling to the newsagent  without a wearing safety helmet.  

It is more likely that we will move to Pakistan than ever return to the UK, but in the unlikely event that we do return to the gulag I think it is only fair that I warn the police that I harbour aspirations to be a malefactor.  I am therefore appending a declaration of intent to this blog, and I suggest that all lovers of liberty do the same.  They can't arrest all of us, can they?  (Actually I think they can - Ed.)

For the Attention of the British Police Service:

My name is Dominic Elson.  When I return to the UK I fully intend to lawfully protest about the UK government's policies, perhaps even to engage in mild acts of civil disobedience with consenting adults, and to take photographs of strategically important sites, such as Vauxhall Bus Station and the Costa Coffee stand at Bristol Parkway railway station.  You may have trouble identifying me as I will never carry an ID card, even if they become compulsory.  However I will be the guy behind the copy of the Guardian newspaper, harrumphing in a passive aggressive way, and muttering that 'something must be done...'  Under mild coercion I will probably sing like a bird,  giving up the names of all my co-conspiritors.  You can crush my fingers, but you can never crush my spirit!

Comments

[Paul]

Yes it is indeed Ironic that since the thaw of the cold war and the fall of "The Wall" much of the Soviet Block has become Europe, the Stazi no longer eves-drops on its people, the KG(used to)B is now the very slick and modern FSB and capitalism is not just aspired to but achieved. All while taxes are modest, the health care and education services are the best it has been for decades. Yet England is now ruled by a bunch of Socialist Scots who chanted communist slogans at university during the cold war and are running the police state Dominic describes so accurately in his blog. While taxes are constantly escalated to pay for "war Campaigns" like Afghanistan (originally a USSR project 1st). There ever evolving fiscal servitudes are levied under propaganda based banners like "Green" and "social" to support ever failing "services" and crumbling infrastructure. To the point whereby the traditionally philanthropic Brits can no longer afford to donate and we tumble into the Abyss that kept the USSR a third world state for three decades. The sooner the great British people switch off their 1984 style video walls or rather plasma screens, disconnect the BBC news propoganda and doom merchants and start thinking for themselves the sooner social justice, the free market and the right to free thought will be restored to this great country.

[Dominic]

Paul,
Thanks for the comment!
A few observations on your analysis:

1) Many Eastern European countries already had decent health and education systems before the fall of communism. In fact, it is partly *because* of their highly educated workforce that many former Warsaw Pact countries have thrived under market liberalisation. The question is: can they maintain such high standards in a low-tax regime?

2) The notion that services rely on philanthropy is interesting, though possibly not supported by the facts. Britain, along with other European countries, has long subsribed to a social contract whereby most of us are taxed so that services can be aggregated and managed by the state. The 'third sector' is an increasing part of this mix, to be sure, but largely funded by the state rather than private donation.

3) Even if data existed to prove that philanthropy suffers if taxes rise (I suspect that the notoriously generous yet highly taxed Scandinavians will put this myth to rest), one needs to ask if such philanthropy is really valid if it is merely expressed as the opportunity cost of taxation? Surely charity should be freely given from one's net disposable income?

4) You link 'social justice', 'free market' and 'free thought' as if there was some kind of causal relationship between them. Perhaps social justice is a precursor to free markets, which in turn allows free thought? One would hope so, yet so often free markets proceed with social justice strangely absent...

Yours,
Dom