Do you remember when they said of the proliferation of CCTV cameras, ‘If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about’?
Suddenly, and chillingly, that fatuous statement can at last be thrown into the abyss of meaninglessness where it belongs after David Cameron announced the following:
“For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens ‘as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone’.”
David Cameron has announced unequivocally that he is going to give the state powers to enforce the will of government on the people and to exact retribution, punishing us for non-compliance. Obeying the law, as the Mirror puts it, will no longer be enough to be enough to ensure you escape retribution by the authorities.
The only problem with being, as Cameron puts it, a passively tolerant society is that if we remain that way he will be able to do whatever he likes to us including exacting retribution and there will be nothing we can do about it in law because the law will no longer be there to protect us.
Is that sinking in? Because it certainly isn’t sinking in here. I’ve been trying get my head round it for 24 hours or more and it has yet to properly sink in. It’s like something from hell and we’re all now the devils pawns.
It will mean that any and all protections we have enjoyed in law in the past will be completely removed and we are all now subject to government dictat and we get no say in that at all. It might seem alarmist to say that we very definitely should be thinking the worst, but if we don’t, and do nothing, the worst will be entirely free to visit itself upon us and completely shatter our lives. Cameron has not just dared to think the unthinkable, he is saying that he will visit it upon us and we will have no protections at all. Whatever any of us might think freedom is, or was, it won’t be any more, that is for sure.
I’ll let Percy Bysshe Shelley from The Mask of Anarchy have the last word:
‘Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number –
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.’
https://www.mirror.co.uk/usvsth3m/how-obeying-law-no-longer-5688690
Keith Lindsay-Cameron
