LONDON -- Familiarity, they say, breeds contempt. In the UK, where I have been for just over a week now, a growing familiarity with the new friendliness and efficiency of London service, is breeding not so much familiarity as a growing unease.
Every day in the London Underground transport system, known affectionately as "The Tube," there are constant friendly and efficient messages broadcast on loudspeakers warning of delays, giving advice on closures with the constant reminders to be vigilant about "suspicious behaviour". "Suspicious behaviour" is intended to cover everything from the pickpockets which, as notices warn "are known to operate in this station," to possible terrorists.
Surveillance camera in Westminster, London. Great Britain has become probably the most watched of any society in the Western world.
The London Underground loudspeakers also continue to explain, occasionally, as they always have, the chilling and rather blunt explanation for train delays that are caused "by a person under a train."
To me the bluntness reassures that all has not changed. What has changed is that the reminders are constant, useful and unlike in the past, can actually be heard. London announcements used to be notorious for being broadcast over a speaker system that rendered them almost totally intelligible.
After a while, though, the constant barrage becomes a little unnerving. You realize that the immense quality of the information is being supplied because of the vast number of closed circuit television cameras that are monitoring the traveling public's every move.
The Big Brother of George Orwell's totalitarian classic 1984 is watching you.
Britain in the 21st century has become probably the most watched of any society in the Western World. In the words of an old West End show by the playwright Henry Livings "We have got you under surveillance."
Whether this is a good or bad thing Manitobans may well wonder as plans go forward to put surveillance cameras on Winnipeg streets.
Anyone who has read any of Ian Rankin's splendid detective novels recognizes both the benefits and the possible dangers to which surveillance cameras can be put. They are fine for catching crooks, but they also spy on what the innocent or at least those innocent of criminal activity are doing.
Pierre Trudeau said that the "state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation" but woe betide the man or woman caught on a camera having an illicit relationship that might be used against him or her.
Worse, of course, is the threat to civil liberties posed by the state knowing which political or other gathering its citizens may be attending. Those in favour of surveillance and the protection it gives, particularly against terrorists, say that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear. What's to fear though is what the state can do with the information and that, in Plato's warning, leads us back to "who shall guard the guardians?"
Since 9/11 and the London bombings, societies on both sides of the Atlantic have had to ask themselves how far they would give up civil liberties to curb those who would blow us up. The irony is that each encroachment on our civil liberties is an encroachment on the society we seek to defend.
In the UK, it's not just the surveillance cameras that are threatening to change the nature of the society. Criminal law has changed to reduce protections for defendants and to make it easier to detain without trial.
The government has also had a plan to introduce identity cards. For years the whole idea of identity cards has been anathema to the British. Identity cards were seen as the key weapon of the police state. The words, "your papers please," uttered in an accent representing whomever Britain was at war with at the time, have been the hated watchwords of film after film and TV show after TV show.
The ideal I grew up with in the UK was that no official had the right to ask you who you were or what you were doing without reasonable cause and you had no obligation whatsoever to prove who you were.
Britain was about to change all that. The government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, however, seems to have had second thoughts. A very limited card scheme was announced last week, and most commentators think that a wholesale identity card system will never be implemented. Political resistance to the ever growing encroachment of the state has perhaps stopped it just in time,
That's good. Britons have never been quiescent when it comes to state control, but since the terrorist bombings of July 7, 2007, it seemed that protection was becoming more important than liberty. The cameras may be hear to stay, but the obstinate British public appears to have said enough is enough.
Nicholas Hirst is CEO of Winnipeg-based television and film producer Original Pictures Inc.
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