Now he tells us
Last night's Moral Maze on the subject of the surveillance society was predictably inconclusive - in my experience, the importance of defending privacy against the state's insatiable will to knowledge is something you either get or you don't. But there were a couple of highlights. An American professor described Britain as a "privacy dystopia" that was a terrible warning to the rest of the world. And in an exchange with state-loving journalist David Aaronovitch the former Tory defence secretary Michael Portillo came out with this killer quote:
As the years pass, it becomes more and more obvious that Portillo's defeat in Enfield in the 1997 election was one of the great political tragedies of recent history.
I having been been in government have every reason for believing that the government routinely abuses the powers it has. It's not a matter of the last resort, it's the first resort. It isn't something that happens exceptionally, it happens all the time.
As the years pass, it becomes more and more obvious that Portillo's defeat in Enfield in the 1997 election was one of the great political tragedies of recent history.
Comments
Is this a surprise to anyone? It's one of the reasons I have no faith in Cameron's promises to rollback the current government's privacy invasion.
Cameron is under huge pressure, not only from libertarians but also other grass roots members. I regard him as fairly weak, so the fact that he's not going along with New Labour suggests that not going along with New Labour is the easiest course.
It is, in honesty, mainly people in safe Labour seats (I live in one) who have the most punitive & authoritarian views. Apart from his pathetic & tedious drug "policy", there is at least some hope.
Time will tell, & I'm sure I'd end up berating a Cameron government regularly, but it can't be this bad.
What I'm finding it hard to understand at the moment is how Vince Cabal and the Lib-Dems could get it right on both Iraq (and I'll admit that by the time the war started, the propaganda had been so effective that even I was in 2 minds) and on the banking crisis, while still riding low in the poles. They got it right when the Conservatives and Labour got it wrong, surely they're the best candidates to take charge? Clegg does kind of suck the atmosphere out of the room though, whereas Cameron charms me every time.