Brits: Citizens, Subjects or Serfs?

I have, from time to time, made passing comment on the egegious predations of The Nanny State on its ... inhabitants. These predations have typically consisted of impositions on their original rights, usually their rights to defend themselves or indeed to own a weapon at all, let alone to use it.

As the rights of citizens to defend themselves have been infringed, they have degenerated in importance from citizenship to subjects of the crown ... actually, subjects of an entrenched bureaucracy. This increasing vulnerability has been mirrored by an increase in the number of goblin predators on the streets. The Brits refer to these (usually male, usually adolescent, usually drunken) goblins as "Yobs", for reasons which may seem reasonable to them but of course makes no sense to the Colonial mind. I've discussed the phenomenon of yob-dom here, in an article which notes in passage that 'yob' is nothing more than 'boy' turned backward. Well, that may make some sense if one considers that boys have become the Dark Side of what once was the youthful incarnation of what should have developed into a responsible, productive citizen of the Empire. Alas, citizenship has gone the way of the Empire, and now the Brits must deal with a serious Crime In The Streets problem.

I discussed representative examples of consequences of the breakdown of civilization's natural checks and balances in August of 2006, in a piece called "Brits lose another 'subject'", wherein I lost all patience with the British legal system and particularly with the degenerate excuse for a police force. We have come to accept that the police are not obligated to protect us from predation, but we had hoped that they would at least make an effort to apprehend violent transgressors against the public peace and welfare. Apparently that is no longer part of the priorities of police in England, and one wonders what they do with the time they spend on duty.

Now we have TWO answers to this question:

One: they sit around filing reports on classroom "homophobia", which theHome Office hopes to have classified as a "Hate Crime".

Gay lobby groups are deeply upset about the use of "homophobic" language in schools, partly because of the common use by teenagers of the word 'gay' as an insult regardless of the perceived sexual orientation of the individual they are insulting.

The Home Office guidance also said that gay lobby groups could set up "third party reporting centres" to pass to police details of "homophobic" incidents which gay individuals themselves have been too scared to report to police.

Police should then record the names and details of individuals passed on by gay lobby groups, it said.

That's right, they don't have time to investigate reports of attempted murder, but they have the time to take action against school children who call their friends 'gay'

Two: they watch television, and shout into microphones:

Dec. 22 (Bloomberg) -- It's Saturday night in Middlesbrough, England, and drunken university students are celebrating the start of the school year, known as Freshers' Week.

One picks up a traffic cone and runs down the street. Suddenly, a disembodied voice booms out from above:

``You in the black jacket! Yes, you! Put it back!'' The confused student obeys as his friends look bewildered.

``People are shocked when they hear the cameras talk, but when they see everyone else looking at them, they feel a twinge of conscience and comply,'' said Mike Clark, a spokesman for Middlesbrough Council who recounted the incident. The city has placed speakers in its cameras, allowing operators to chastise miscreants who drop coffee cups, ride bicycles too fast or fight outside bars.

That's right. The Nanny State has enlisted Big Brother to help her control the unmanageable masses. If their plans work out, this dubious replacement for 'the cop on the block' is only the next step in a long-range program of replacing people with machines.

Almost 70 years after George Orwell created the all-seeing dictator Big Brother in the novel ``1984,'' Britons are being watched as never before. About 4.2 million spy cameras film each citizen 300 times a day, and police have built the world's largest DNA database. Prime Minister Tony Blair said all Britons should carry biometric identification cards to help fight the war on terror.

``Nowhere else in the free world is this happening,'' said Helena Kennedy, a human rights lawyer who also is a member of the House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament. ``The American public would find such inroads into civil liberties wholly unacceptable.'' (Emphasis added.)

During the past decade, the government has spent 500 million pounds ($1 billion) on spy cameras and now has one for every 14 citizens, according to a September report prepared for Information Commissioner Richard Thomas by the Surveillance Studies Network, a panel of U.K. academics.

I'm not entirely convinced by the comment about the resistance of the American public to intrusive spy-machines. But certainly the Brits have not only allowed their government to take over an increasing control of their personal habits (see below) and daily lives, but they're lining up to buy technology to spy on each other.

According to this article in the London 'Daily Mail':

A new telephone lie detector system promises to pick up on tell-tale signs of stress in a caller's voice whenever they tell a fib.

Available for free, the Kishkish lie detector can be easily downloaded from the web and used by those who make phone calls over the internet.

If your telephone service is one which runs through the Internet (presumably one such as Vonage), you too can tell if your sweetie is lying about 'working late tonite, honey'.

...

In fact, the Brits have serious budgetary concerns. Their Socialist National Health Service (NHS) system has been increasingly bogged down due to the increased demands on it. A recent news article (for which I cannot immediately find the reference) notes that fully ten percent of their NHS budget is taken up with care for abused children, a situation which threatens to bring the entire Socialist structure to its knees.

Rather than address the root causes of child abuse (unemployment, breakdown of the family unit and civilized rules of conduct in general), the Brits have looked around for 'other places' where they can cut down on the demands for Socialized Medicine. And they have found ... fat people. Also, those who smoke and drink seem to be taking up more than their fair share of the limited resources made available under Socialized Medicine.

It says here that "Smokers, people with alcohol problems and the obese could be denied priority treatment on the NHS if they do not try to change their lifestyle", and apparently the Brits are seriously considering restricting people thus categorized from access to "priority NHS care".

The article, of course, doesn't mention this as a budgetary measure; instead, they tout it as a 'lifestyle' issue:

A Cabinet review group on public services was shocked by the scale of the burden caused by people's lifestyles. "Ministers were shocked by the fact that half of all years of healthy life are lost as a result of behavioural factors (e.g. smoking and diet)," a Government source said.

Ministers want a "cultural change" in public services so the state can support and encourage people to change their behaviour to improve their life chances and well-being.

While they're at it, they're going to address OTHER societal ills by action which on the face of it seems to directly contradict the budgetary issues: they have a problem with yobs who drop out of school, so they're going to throw more money at it.

They also want to extend the number of "contracts" between the citizen and the state, such as the £30-a-week education maintenance allowances paid to over-16s who remain in further education.

Oh, and perhaps you think that proves that they don't REALLY have a problem financing Socialized Medicine?

Experts warned this month that obesity, which costs the NHS £7bn a year, could bankrupt it if left unchecked and predicted that the proportion of obese adults would rise from one in five to one in three by 2010. Smoking-related diseases cost an estimated £1.7bn a year, with the same amount spent on alcohol-related problems. The treatment of alcohol-related harm, such as violent crime and traffic accidents, costs an estimated £20bn.

Coming full-circle back to the question of "how do you solve a problem like Maria Yobs?", the same article offers this observation:

The cabinet reviews have already provoked controversy. A paper for the security, crime and justice group, leaked at the weekend, suggested that crime could rise for the first time in more than a decade as economic growth slows, and that the prison population, already at a record 80,000, could rise to 100,000 over the next five years.

The Government has promised an extra 8,000 prison places but it is not clear how they will be funded. The Treasury has frozen the Home Office budget in real terms from 2008-11 other than for spending on security and anti-terrorism work.

Somehow I find it difficult to accept the assertion that "... crime could rise for the first time in more than a decade ...", given the news reports mentioned above and elsewhere.

(Incidently, the Brits are unable to maintain an acceptable level of performance in their education system, too. That's a situation which isn't noticably better here in the States, either, so don't think I'm suggesting that England is the only 'First World' country with a failing Nanny State understructure.)

Ultimately, the British Government's Great Experiment (in Socialism) is proving to be as unworkable as we always thought it would be. The solution, as evidenced by these measures, seems to be to reduce the status of the average Brit from 'Citizen' to 'Subject' and now all the way down to 'Serf':

serf

Pronunciation: (sûrf), [key]
—n.
1. a person in a condition of servitude, required to render services to a lord, commonly attached to the lord's land and transferred with it from one owner to another.
2. a slave.

So much for the wonders of Western Civilization. But less you believe that there's nothing to be done but shake your head in sadness at the decline of what was once a great nation, be of good cheer!

We still have the United Nations to tell us when we're not running our country The Right Way:

UN voices concerns over 'unfairness' in Saddam execution verdict
By Reuters
ZURICH - The UN human rights chief on Thursday called for restraint by Iraqi authorities over Saddam Hussein's death sentence, saying there were concerns about the fairness of the original trial.

"The appeal judgment is a lengthy and complex decision that requires careful study," Louise Arbour, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement.

Arbour also said that under the terms of international agreements signed by Iraq Saddam had the right to appeal to "appropriate authorities" for possible commutation or a pardon.

The United Nations: Voted "Best Friend" by dictators the world over.

World Socialism, here we come!

NOTE:
Some people are really choked up by the prospect of the impending up-string of The Butcher of Baghdad.

I am not.

UPDATE:

Neither were the Iraqis.