Anticipating Keir Starmer’s ascent to the office of Prime Minister, I’m reminded of that great Bob Monkhouse line: “When I said I was going to be a comedian they all laughed. Well, they’re not laughing now!”
As a radical Left-wing schoolboy, Starmer probably envisaged a future when Britain became something like Cuba, but without the weather. Later, as he matured maybe the social-democratic paradise that was Sweden became the model. But, now on the cusp of power if he were to look around the world which society might his gaze alight upon as the model for British society within the next generation? I’m not sure. But my fear is that whatever our potential next Labour Prime Minister aims for, I suspect where we will end up is something dispiritingly like South Africa, but with Chinese characteristics.
The adoption of ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’ has had a remarkable effect on the Chinese and world economies over the past 40 years or so. But it’s another set of ‘Chinese characteristics’, this time relating to the ‘surveillance’ society, utilising facial recognition technology, social credit scoring and fiscal cancelling, when allied to South African style social breakdown, that may become the societal model that Britain and many other parts of Europe and the West are destined to follow unless steps are taken to resist this trend.
Contemporary South Africa is characterised by extreme levels of violent crime with an annual homicide rate 40 times greater than the U.K.’s. Over one third of the population is unemployed, with rates among the young even higher.
South African society has always been a two-tier society. The apartheid racial split is still evident, but the simple racial divide has to some extent been overtaken by the emergence of both a black and Asian middle class moving into what were previously exclusively white areas. Increasingly segregation is class based, with the middle-class living in gated compounds or migrating.
In the 30 years since the ANC came to power, the share of GDP going to the poorest 50% of the population has halved. Conversely, the share of GDP going to the wealthiest 0.1% has doubled.
It’s not so different in the U.K. A recent report by the Centre for Social Justice, ‘Two Nations: the state of poverty in the U.K.‘, draws attention to the ever-growing divide between the ‘have’s and have nots’ and the social breakdown that this can lead to. It highlights that many people turn to welfare rather than work and that wages tend to do little to improve people’s financial well-being.
Back in South Africa we find that in addition to a worsening of the social class divide public services have failed to improve. South Africa now is plagued by rolling power cuts, with many households and businesses using petrol generators to keep the lights on. It doesn’t take much imagination to foresee a similar situation in the U.K. with unreliable power provision. Already, people are being paid to switch off their electricity and last winter it was only the mild weather that allowed us to escape power outages.
In South Africa crime, particularly violent crime is endemic. The police have largely withdrawn from many urban areas. In Johannesburg, the commercial centre has largely relocated itself to Sandton, a purpose-built Central Business District, and in the process abandoned the old centre to urban decay.
We see similar patterns beginning to emerge in many European cities. ‘Working from home’ has exacerbated the trend that’s seen the hollowing-out of our cities. Empty shops and offices in city centres have permitted the emergence of tent cities and squatters.
Riots have broken out in Dublin and many other European cities. Islamist inspired stabbings across Europe have lost their ability to shock, though this may, in part be due to the suppression of the details of the story by the mainstream media. As in South Africa, the police in areas of Stockholm, Brussels, Dublin and Paris observe ‘no-go’ areas.
Elon Musk, discussing his motivation to buy Twitter with Joe Rogan, attributed the decision to the social collapse of downtown San Francisco, which he blamed on the widespread adoption of woke ideology. This collapse is more fully explored In a recent UnHerd piece, where Freddie Sayers investigates the causes of San Francisco’s decline. Despite the self-evident problems there are plans to partially ‘defund the police’ with the loss of hundreds of officers. The suspicion must be that the residual police officers will spend their time policing the more ‘well-to-do’ areas while, effectively ‘no-go’ areas will be left to ‘police’ themselves.
Like our haircuts, fashion sense and dance moves, we hit a rut in our late teens or early 20s and never really break out. So, it is with much of our politics. I rather suspect that Keir Starmer in his dreams still hopes that one he’ll wake up and magically we’ve all morphed back into 1980s Sweden, Abba will be number one again and Volvos will be rolling off the production line.
In contemplating the prospect of ‘South Africa with Chinese characteristics’ there are three fundamental questions to ask. Firstly, is it inevitable? Secondly, is it desirable? Thirdly, is there the will to stop or reverse the trend?
Sad to say, but I think unless something is done very soon to control it then it’s inevitable. What’s more, there’s no obvious sign that many people either recognise it as a threat or, if they do, are minded to fight against it.
The surveillance society is not going back in its box anytime soon. Let’s look at a few examples. Facial recognition technology is already widely deployed. It makes policing easier and cheaper; it’s here to stay. Likewise, electronic payments. Like it or not, cash is disappearing fast, and unlike cash, electronic payments always leave a trail. Stephen Timms MP in a recent speech in Parliament highlighted new legislation that will allow Government to look inside your bank account. Your phone tracks you, ANPR cameras track you. Your spending and viewing history tracks you. The surveillance society is here, we’re already living with it.
Fifteen-minute cities appear to be coming fast, but even without them various forms of ‘zonal’ control allow the authorities to track people in real time via mobile phone and facial recognition of ANPR cameras.
The second question is the desirability of the surveillance society. The argument in favour is always the same: “If you haven’t got anything to hide, then what’s the problem?” But, of course, surveillance of private citizens by the state is the antithesis of what the role of the state should be. The state should be subject to the will of the people, serving individuals in pursuing their goals, yet increasingly every facet of our lives is subject to state oversight.
The key drivers that allow this continual extension of the surveillance state are cost and fear.
Let’s take ‘cost’. People want their streets policed. Installing cameras, deploying drones and tracking vehicles is much cheaper and more cost-effective than deploying police officers to do the same job. Doing an electronic search of people’s bank accounts for anomalous payments is far cheaper and more effective than deploying tax inspectors. Road pricing by the mile driven is far more targeted and opens up the possibility of using the price mechanism to manage congestion, but it requires real-time vehicle tracking. All these things can happen and so, we must assume, will happen.
The surveillance state inevitably changes the relationship between the governors and the governed. In the spirit of Churchill, his advice to ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’ was very much taken to heart during the Covid period, which saw a remarkable extension of state power and the diminution of the ability of the individual to resist that power.
With regard to ‘fear’, Covid gave us a glimpse of how ‘nudge’ units and the control of the news and social media can instil totally irrational levels of fear in the vast majority of the population. In the same way that it was relatively straightforward to whip up paranoia over Covid, so we see the same tactics being used over Net Zero. Who’s to say similar tactics won’t be used over ‘terrorism’ or the threat of the ‘ultra-Right’.
Enlarge the state and you create the need for yet more state resources to both carry out those additional tasks and manage conformity of the population. The budget deficit is running at about 5% of GDP as we continue to pile up debt and reduce the ability of the State to direct additional resources where they’re needed. Interest payments on U.K. borrowings are running at about 10% of Government spending. As an item of expenditure, debt interest payments run second only to the NHS!
There is an obvious need for the state to do less but it keeps doing more.
If the Government can incite enough fear of viruses, climate change and terrorism people can be persuaded that ever greater levels of surveillance are indeed for their own good.
Unless the erosion of freedoms can move up the political agenda I see no prospect of the slide towards South Africa with Chinese characteristics not continuing. Organisations such as the Free Speech Union and Big Brother Watch, in addition to the citizen groups that emerged during the pandemic such as UsForThem, have worked hard to highlight the growing problem. However, neither Labour nor the Conservatives put personal freedoms front and centre of their agenda. Encouragingly, Reform has a lot to say about personal freedoms. But if it’s only Reform raising the issue it’s too easy for the mainstream media to dismiss personal freedom as a minority interest of the ‘far-Right’, with their usual smear.
The obvious requirement is for someone or something to articulate the inherent danger of the loss of personal freedoms. We’re very much in ‘boiling frog’ territory and unless many more people can be awakened to the importance of what’s being lost then it’s only a matter of time before we discover that our society looks like South Africa with Chinese characteristics. Not a prospect I relish for my children.
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Sure. We live in a democracy, so people voting against it at the next election.
Sorry. Bad joke.
I am getting more concerned that we will have a tipping point very soon when the Merde hits the fan.I think it will be when the Liemore party wins the next election and really starts doubling down on the mad nett zero plans it has .
At that point the pissed of masses will have had enough .Then anything is possible race based/religion based /energy based there will be some kind of revolt .And it will not involve prounouns and rainbow flags .It will be very nasty and I have no idea what the outcome could be .Sorry to add joy to your day >
Logic dictates that the more security cameras there are the lower the crime rate, as increased surveillance should act as a deterrent but also make the police’s job easier in identifying criminals, but is this the case? For instance, isn’t London meant to be one of the most surveilled cities in Europe, with something like 70 cameras/1000 people? Therefore London should be seeing less crime than most other European countries.
I don’t know what the crime stats are but what I do know is that knife crimes have increased. Is this just because the police are demonstrably pitiful at fulfilling their purpose? I think many people might not mind a bit more of an invasion of privacy if it meant they’re less likely to become victims of crime, but is the pay-off really being experienced in real life? More on knife crime here;
”London mayor Sadiq Khan has admitted it was an error for his mayoral office to claim that knife crime in the U.K. capital has fallen under his watch after the country’s independent statistics regulator revealed it had actually risen by 40 percent.
A mayoral press release published back in July praised Khan’s leadership in reducing knife crime across the city since he took charge of City Hall in 2016.
However, the Labour politician was left red-faced after Ed Humpherson, director general at the Office for Statistics Regulation, said the claim was “incorrect” and had the ability to seriously mislead the public.
The stats agency director revealed his office was engaging with Khan’s team to issue a correction as knife crime has, in fact, “significantly increased across the relevant period”.
https://rmx.news/uk/leftist-london-mayor-sadiq-khan-says-knife-crime-has-fallen-under-his-watch-its-actually-soared-by-40/
Having surveillance is one thing. Having officials who follow it up and do something is quite another.
Surveillance enables you to see who the terrorists are so you can “monitor” them. ——But maybe the families of the Manchester Arena victims might think the monitoring could have been of a higher standard.
It perhaps might also help if an extra jail or two gets built and the political class of hand wringers stop thinking that discipline and punishment are dirty words.
“If you haven’t got anything to hide, then what’s the problem?”
The problem with this view is that those saying it usually cannot imagine how malevolent the state can become. They cannot imagine a state which will make you an enemy of the state, make your views and your actions justification for your denunciation and eradication by the masses – simply because they want to get rid of you, because you have commited the sin of recognising them for what they are and they will turn their system against you to achieve their aims. They cannot afford for your ideas to be heard by the masses – they will lose their power if the masses listen to you.
This is why a malevolent state wants to know everything about you and make you feel free and happy to allow them. It’s obvious, really…
You may know you’re innocent in God’s eyes, but the system doesn’t care about that.
Most of my acquaintances still don’t get it…
eppur si muove
There’s the rub. The same comatose masses that thought lockdowns were a good idea and that the world is going to end in 2050 if we don’t build enough wind farms or stop eating meat….still don’t get it. The frogs are boiling and they don’t even realise it.
Oh come on! What could possibly go wrong?
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/30/1033941/afghanistan-biometric-databases-us-military-40-data-points/
The pre-war Dutch kept accurate records of their citizenship, something the Gestapo captialised on when rounding up the Jewish.
Ah yes, the “Nothing to Hide” division of the Central Planning Department at Social Justice Headquarters.
The only silver lining to this I’ve seen recently is that #ClimateScam was trending on X in the UK for 4 straight days.. I truly hope this is a sign that the comatose masses are stirring.
This is just a foretaste of things to come.
https://www.stephentimms.org.uk/latest-news/2023/11/30/stephen-criticises-government-plans-to-inspect-bank-accounts
I thik the answer is yes but it has more to do with entropy than intervention. I would say that we reached peak tech in 2016 and from then on enthusiasm has been dropping. Rudolf Steiner said that even in the materialistic Ahrimanic age the will and ability to design the instruments of control relies on the potency of the human spirit. Poorer countries are still in the first flush of enthusiasm for these trinkets. And given that we are moving into much more difficult times I think you will see a discarding of the digital in favour of the real. These systems are so fragile it is only a matter of time before this is revealed. I would say to anyone be careful in 2024 if you use online banking because the sophistication of the attacks on these systems is growing exponentially.
“The Difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian one is…….a matter of time” Rand. ———-That time is fast approaching
The fabric simply isn’t there. Safetyism has no vitality and can’t provide anything. I don’t think that we are moving towards a statist future quite the contrary. We might wish in the early stages that we stuck with the old approach but it will be dead. I know it semms inconceivable now but I would wager that within five years we will no longer have a state in the traditional sense. Just look at the acceleration in terms of historical events in the last two years. Surely it is obvious that the whole world is about to be thrown into a period of deep flux and uncertainty.
I wish for anarchy, when every man and woman accepts the only authority as that of their own ideas, decisions and actions.
Leaderless. A contract with your immediate neighbours. A fluid, loose assemblage of thinking people who can move wherever and whenever they wish, a ghost, a shapeless form the authorities barely see, never mind repress.
Idealist. I know. More of an anti-idealist though.
But it’s Greek, you see…
an – without
archos – leader
They twisted the word to make people fear and despise anarchists. Anarchists are the real threat to systems everywhere, not through violence, but through…. DANGEROUS IDEAS OF PERSONAL FREEDOM AND PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY!
Bob Marley, him say, have no fear for atomic energy…We shouldn’t fear this force rather we should seek the composure to put it in its place. It is not for us to defeat Lucifer and Ahriman it is for us to comprehend and incorporate them. They are far older and higher and more developed spirits than we are. Warfare is simply impossible. If you seek intitiation you will find these things anyway.
You can stop it by being mindful of your online behaviour and gradually reducing it. Trust me the digital partakes of the darkest force. Everything about us is trinary just ask everyone from Plato to Freud – everywhere there is the tripartite division of the soul. The trichotomy lies deep in us. . This force has bene attacking us for aeons just focus on the three not the two. That in itself provides protection.
A Ted Kaczynski scholar pointed out something that Ted said – that the technology makes you reluctant to criticise it. It is true Kaczynski is the deepest and most honest thinker I have come across. Look at everything and learn the real lesson. You know you don’t want to but you know you ought to.
If you want it put in terms of JC – if thine eye offend thee then pluck it out. Or don’t and see where it gets you. If you see it and fail to remove it then its toxicity will grow.
The only way to stop this impulse is a re-asserion and it won’t happen by accident. I can look at teenagers and how over the last three decades they have become more diffident, less independent and less liely to take risks. So what brought that about? It is important because if a civilisation is to survive then it needs to invigorate its young.
I think huge numbers of people do see the problem but we have no way out. We are offered a vote for the government or a vote for the government. The system is corrupt and ensures its own continuance. The only ‘voice’ we have is to refuse to vote so that the mask of democratic legitimacy cannot be maintained.
Blair started this, and who has benefited from the surveillance state, not the general public that’s for sure, instead its a revenue generator for the police, for local councils, Londons Mayor and of course westminster, the opportunity to introduce lots of petty rules and regulations which result in yes you have guessed it fines or charges.
Police solving cases from thefts, house breaking, rape and murder are at an all time low, so the cameras etc certainly have done nothing to help victims.
To the politicos and their little demons we are nothing more than lab rats to be controlled and experimented on and monitored on their numerous tv’s and watching our every transaction. Would life be any worse I wonder if every camera and digital monitoring system were taken down. Probably for the Police and the Public sector as they might have to do the job they were originally intended for, I suspect the Genral public would benefit tremendously
Lots of gloomy predictions and analysis in this thread of where we went wrong which I don’t disagree with. The question is what do we do? Firstly, we don’t comply with all the nonsense. Secondly we ignore all the brainwashing and groupthink by celebrating free speech and those who question everything without being dogmatic. Thirdly we speak out wherever we can.
The important thing as individuals is to build up our resilience. I don’t want anarchy and believe the answer is building local communities. Imagine a world without all the conveniences we’ve become used to, including modern communications. Times will be hard but we must never sell our souls to those who want to control them.
Watching GB News the other day a Labour representative was talking about the criminal invasion across the channel. Challenged to say how a Labour Government would deal with the problem, he came out with the usual b0ll0cks about “safe routes,” doing a deal with Macron and then said “ID cards” to prevent them from working in the black economy.
Obviously they’re not thinking about actual cards, it will be Digital ID ….. Blair’s wet dream for well over a decade now. A majority, who are furious about the invasion, will be told that this is the way to stop them coming and they will meekly accept their own surveillance “for the greater good.”
I have no experience of South Africa so I can’t compare the UK to Jo’burg. It does seem to me that we are on the same route as American cities – ghettoised; communities living apart together; poor public services; dirty, run down areas with a violent drug and alcohol dependent underclass; all overseen by corrupt governmental institutions which gave up serving the people a long time ago.
A deliberate policy of dismantling the most cohesive and civilised nation on earth started a long time ago.
Reform is not the only party who wants to turn the tide against the Uniparty that is intent on ruling over every aspect of our lives. The Heritage Party has an extremely robust manifesto including rolling back the state by repealing all the laws that have had unintended consequences (or nasty intended consequences). As a consequence, the State would be massively reduced.
And Reclaim (etc.). But people with minds of their own don’t co-operate with each other, even if they had a clue how to do what they think needs to be done.
Governments and government bureaucracies are the root of all the problems.Governments are continuously increasing in size, their powers and taxation levels and have for decades. Conservative voices have always warned of these dangers to people’s lives and base their policies on smaller government, fewer gatekeepers and lower taxation. Until we reign in this continuous growth in government we will suffer these appalling events and destruction of the country.
‘The new concept of weapons will cause ordinary people and military men alike to be greatly astonished at the fact that commonplace things that are close to them can also become weapons with which to engage in war. We believe that some morning people will awake to discover with surprise that quite a few gentle and kind things have begun to have offensive and lethal characteristics.’ Unrestricted Warfare by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. Not read nearly as much as it should be to understand current events (and the role of fear of the commonplace as much, if not far more, than technological prowess in achieving strategic aims).