Things get more and more...
Things get more and more like Orwell's 1984, and people know it. It is almost incredible that benefit fraud is being tackled with publicity along the lines of "We're watching you" and "We can follow your movements" printed on bus shelter posters. Walking around Leicester today I will have been filmed on hundreds of cameras; there is information on me, along with everyone else, stored in databases I don't even know exist and would have to go to great financial and legal lengths to get access to, let alone have removed. So what's wrong with this? This is just for our safety, right?
I am often accused of being idealist. Live in the real world, I am told, deal with things practically, stop spouting ideology. It is as though ideology has no place, and never has. When did this happen? Is it not true that every society in the world draws its codes and laws from social or religious ideology?
Spending millions of pounds on hundreds of thousands of cameras up and down the country is not positive. It does society no good. So what if it reduces crime, statistically? Is that all we care about these days? Orwell warned us that 1984 was the way the world was heading, and that in this new world our only emotions would be fearful. So what about the drawbacks of installing cameras? For to suggest there are none would be thoroughly erroneous. It cannot be denied that, as necessary as some may believe it to be, this policy represents the addressing of the symptoms of a problem, rather than the tackling of its causes. The majority of serious crime is committed through need or addiction. It is committed by those in the underclass who need money. To tell them that, however desperate their situation, they should not commit crime is laughable. Why? It is idealistic! It is easy enough for us comfortable middle class to say they should not to support themselves through crime, but in their shoes I suspect our conscience would not be quite so prominent. The hungry stomach knows no law. So if crime is increasing, it is because our underclass is becoming increasingly alienated under recent government.
Cameras as a method of crime prevention is designed to promote fear: it is inherent in its chances of success. But the fear it creates is not limited to serious criminals, or even those who commit less serious offences; it stirs up an atmosphere of fear and police superiority across the whole of our society, and we all suffer. It promotes a two-tier society, where a message is sent to those who commit crime that we do not care about why they do it; that we just want them to go away. It undermines the first principle of our judicial system. Anyone who tells me that this route is a satisfactory way for our communities to operate is living in an idealist's dreamland, and it will achieve absolutely nothing.
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