I am a camera: surveillance, high street style. Photograph: Martin Godwin.
When a senior policeman wonders if we are becoming an Orwellian society, it's time to pay attention. Ian Readhead, Hampshire's Deputy Chief Constable, has gone on record to say that the town of Stockbridge in Hampshire is overreacting by installing a £10,000 CCTV system, and that the only result will be to increase the sense of authoritarian oppression that is spreading across Britain. Congratulations to him for pointing out that the cameras have had no effect whatsoever: in fact, crime has actually gone up since they were installed.
Mr Redhead's statement is a sign that the penny is at last beginning to drop: we may be losing the very way of life that we seek to protect with these systems. I happen to know Stockbridge. You cannot imagine a more peaceful or well-heeled town. I will now make a point of avoiding the two shops where I buy fishing tackle; I will ignore its antique shops, its fine tearooms, and leave them all to the benighted victims of the bossy, neurotic council that ordered the cameras.
The anti-CCTV movement is beginning to gain some successes. In the west country, the Herald Express reports that Kate Bush has been forced to remove cameras from her property at East Prawle; and in Dawlish, a struggle continues against another council that desires to watch residents all the time they are in a public space.
Mr Readhead makes another serious point about the retention of teenagers' DNA. None of us know what secrets are locked up in each person's genetic profile, and we cannot tell how these samples will be used in the future. It is utterly wrong for anyone to have these most private data removed and retained if they have not committed a crime, but it is odious that teenagers, who may have simply been a witness to a crime or are questioned and not charged, are being forced to contribute to the national DNA database.
CCTV and the building of state databases are one of the emblems of Tony Blair's tenure in No 10. Today, we learn that the Home Office has secret plans to force council workers, charity staff and doctors to tip off police about anyone they believe could commit a violent crime. The risks of people being penalised when they have done nothing to break the law are obvious, but it underlines the fact that the Labour government is slowly abandoning due process, the principle that there should be no punishment unless an ordinary court of law has decided that the law has been broken.
The Home Office wants to turn us into a nation that is watched the whole time, and to achieve a state where each of us owes some kind of proof of good behaviour and intentions. In places where the cameras cannot probe, the state will expect us to report on our colleagues, clients and fellow citizens - not on what they have done, but on what they may do. See the film about East Germany under the Stasi - The Lives of Others - and will understand the kind of society we are building.
