John Harris
by John Harris
This will be the year of the intrusive, oppressive state. Obviously, this will not much distinguish it from 2013, 2012 or 2011. But still: fundamental issues of government and its reach into our lives are now bubbling away as never before, and may well reach boiling point over the next 12 months.
The fallout from Edward Snowden’s revelations goes on: in the US, the latest stories concern a National Security Agency programme aimed at breaking all forms of digital encryption, while the debate about legislating to curtail surveillance powers rages.
Meanwhile, the modern Conservative party evidently wants to accelerate Britain’s progress towards being a country of spot checks and roving billboards instructing illicit migrants to hand themselves in, and the rest of us to grass them up. Large parts of the welfare state increasingly look not like a safety net, but a mess of traps, intended to enforce complete obedience under pain of destitution. Doctors, nurses and teachers work to central diktat as never before. And from the role of private firms in our penal and borders system to the ties that bind the Internet’s corporate providers to government (something at the heart of the storm over data collection, and now the government’s seemingly pernicious “porn filter”), it is increasingly hard to tell where government ends and the private realm begins: what blurs the two is effectively a shadow state, which gets bigger and bigger.)
The political right has big problems here: it uses the rhetoric of small government but enforces its opposite. But so too does the left. Far too many on my side of politics still have their heads in the sand, holding on to a ragbag of notions that now bears no serious examination: that so-called civil liberties should always come a distant second to schools, hospitals and such like; that the centralised, snooping, target-driven state can be our friend, so long as it can be once again captured by Labour and put to the correct uses; and that from the NHS to the BBC, so long as giant and unwieldy institutions can be kept away from the private market, all will be well.
In orthodox politics there are occasional flashes of recognition of how much we need to tame, and then radically remodel, government. Localism, when it actually amounts to something coherent, is part of the noise. None of this is an argument for anarchism or the stupid form of Tory politics which believes that so long as public spending can be pushed below a certain share of GDP, liberty will be assured. It is not intended to overlook what only the state can do: redistribute income; confront corporate power; forge the international agreements we need to fight everything from climate change to corporate tax avoidance. But there is no argument for extending those truths into the kind of boundless leviathan that Britain has ended up with. The truth is that the arrogant, centralised state is as much of a problem as the out-of-control market, and the dominion of one is symbiotically related to the tyranny of the other. From that, all else follows. The future politics of the left will either be pluralist, localist and libertarian, or will shrivel.
THE GUARDIANby John Harris
This will be the year of the intrusive, oppressive state. Obviously, this will not much distinguish it from 2013, 2012 or 2011. But still: fundamental issues of government and its reach into our lives are now bubbling away as never before, and may well reach boiling point over the next 12 months.
The fallout from Edward Snowden’s revelations goes on: in the US, the latest stories concern a National Security Agency programme aimed at breaking all forms of digital encryption, while the debate about legislating to curtail surveillance powers rages.
Meanwhile, the modern Conservative party evidently wants to accelerate Britain’s progress towards being a country of spot checks and roving billboards instructing illicit migrants to hand themselves in, and the rest of us to grass them up. Large parts of the welfare state increasingly look not like a safety net, but a mess of traps, intended to enforce complete obedience under pain of destitution. Doctors, nurses and teachers work to central diktat as never before. And from the role of private firms in our penal and borders system to the ties that bind the Internet’s corporate providers to government (something at the heart of the storm over data collection, and now the government’s seemingly pernicious “porn filter”), it is increasingly hard to tell where government ends and the private realm begins: what blurs the two is effectively a shadow state, which gets bigger and bigger.)
The political right has big problems here: it uses the rhetoric of small government but enforces its opposite. But so too does the left. Far too many on my side of politics still have their heads in the sand, holding on to a ragbag of notions that now bears no serious examination: that so-called civil liberties should always come a distant second to schools, hospitals and such like; that the centralised, snooping, target-driven state can be our friend, so long as it can be once again captured by Labour and put to the correct uses; and that from the NHS to the BBC, so long as giant and unwieldy institutions can be kept away from the private market, all will be well.
In orthodox politics there are occasional flashes of recognition of how much we need to tame, and then radically remodel, government. Localism, when it actually amounts to something coherent, is part of the noise. None of this is an argument for anarchism or the stupid form of Tory politics which believes that so long as public spending can be pushed below a certain share of GDP, liberty will be assured. It is not intended to overlook what only the state can do: redistribute income; confront corporate power; forge the international agreements we need to fight everything from climate change to corporate tax avoidance. But there is no argument for extending those truths into the kind of boundless leviathan that Britain has ended up with. The truth is that the arrogant, centralised state is as much of a problem as the out-of-control market, and the dominion of one is symbiotically related to the tyranny of the other. From that, all else follows. The future politics of the left will either be pluralist, localist and libertarian, or will shrivel.
THE GUARDIAN
