Nearly 63 years ago, British writer George Orwell published his seminal tale of grinding dystopia – Nineteen Eighty Four. His forecast was that by that year state control would be so powerful over ordinary people that a Big Brother tyrant would be able to peer into every corner of life.
The year in reality was a little less frightening. Band Aid topped the charts with a UK Christmas number one in the form of Do They Know it’s Christmas?, which, far from lamenting state-controlled brutality, celebrated mass giving and charity.

Seeds of Big Brother

But 28 years later we finally have the potential for a Big Brother that George Orwell and his character Winston Smith would recognise. The British government’s proposal last week that the country’s police and security services should be granted much more far-reaching powers to pry into email and social media communications as well as Internet use – possibly without judicial authority in the first instance – are the sort of measures of which the jack-booted rulers of Oceania would be proud.
As our cover article this issue points out, the proposals would catapult Britain to near the top of the international league table of government snooping. Quite probably, the UK would be leading the supposedly democratic societies in this draconian field, with only totalitarian regimes such as China and North Korea taking an even more enthusiastic approach to spying on their own citizens.
Proponents will claim that in a world of hyper-electronic communication, the authorities require advanced methods to battle the great bête noire of our age, international terrorism. Ever since Islamic fundamentalists smashed three hijacked aeroplanes into New York and Washington in 2001, security services in Western democracies have been pushing their way to the head of the funding queues of their respective governments, demanding not only more cash for gadgets to combat the ‘War on Terror’, but also more power to crack down on anyone they have an inkling or a gut feeling might be a terrorist sympathiser.

A matter of trust

The difficult element of their argument is that security chiefs can fall back on the almost logically undefeatable premise that they can’t be transparent in their investigations because if they were they would tip off those clever, cagey and conniving terrorists. As citizens, we have to trust them and government ministers when they say they will do the right thing; that they will of course protect civil liberties and not victimise suspects on the grounds of hunches and scant evidence. They know what is good for us – it is a big, bad nasty world out there, populated by shady characters who would just as soon slip on a suicide bomber’s vest as offer you a cup of tea.
It is, almost to the word, the argument employed by the rulers of Oceania – a rationale that Winston Smith initially swallowed, but eventually began to doubt. Those doubts ultimately landed him in Room 101 for a tête-à-tête with some rather belligerent and sharp-toothed rodents.
Suggestions that the British government’s proposals lead inexorably to Room 101 and a date with its resident rats are extreme, but they serve to illustrate a point. Hard-won democratic freedoms and civil liberties are precisely that – hard won. Sacrificing them will come at a hard cost.