The Spoons That Are My Ears!

So the British government now plans to spy on its citizens via Facebook and other social networking sites. When will this unamusing insanity end? Only when the UK is a fully-fledged police state, I imagine. The hyper-exaggerated threat of terrorism continues to be used as a pathetic excuse for the erosion of our already miniscule freedoms. Today I walked past a poster encouraging people to report their neighbours for suspicious activity. The poster features a bin full of empty bottles with the tagline "These chemicals won’t be used in a bomb because the neighbour reported the dumped containers..."

How idiotically paranoid is that? When I was a teenager, making explosives was a hobby of mine. I blew up my garage. I blew up a school classroom. But I was interested in rocketry, not terrorism. Explosives don't necessarily have anything to do with bombs. But that's not the point. Encouraging citizens to snitch on their neighbours is an offensively lazy way of creating a dictatorship. The Gestapo worked in a similar way. Far from being a ruthlessly efficient uber-organisation employing trained agents and meticulous spies, it was actually a small scale ramshackle group of shoddy administrators who relied on gossips and curtain-twitchers to 'uncover' supposed enemies of the state.

Our government wants to turn its own people into a whimpering mob of tongue-wagging sissies. I refuse to comply. I'm a man, not a jelly-eunuch. What happened to the vision of Britain we were sold when I was a youngster? What happened to courage, honour and refusing to bend the knee? And whatever happened to the idea that a government is the servant of its people, in other words our servant, and that it's supposed to do what we tell it, not the other way around! The government is NOT there to do what's 'best' for us but to do our will, whatever that will might be, even if it's something completely irrational or self-destructive. That's why we pay it.