So now the country with the most CCTV cameras in the “civilized” world also has the most hooded youths. On a dismal ride back up to London on a CCTV-fitted train through the Oxfordshire countryside the other Sunday afternoon, I was joined, in an otherwise empty carriage, by three persons in large feature-concealing hooded sweatshirts. In an idle moment while the train was stalled outside a tunnel, I found myself reflecting that, even after an hour in their company, I’d have a job picking them out of a police lineup.
“Er, well, he was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, officer.”
“Did the shadow on his upper chest indicate any other features, such as the length of his nose, or an unusually hirsute mole?”
“It might have, but I couldn’t tell, as the sweatshirt was black.”
“Hmm. A black sweatshirt. Well, that narrows it down a bit.”
Happily, the lads graciously declined to stab me. Not all hooded youths are criminal, but the larger percentage who aren’t favour the garb in part because it flips the finger at the surveillance state. It is, thus, a CCTV-generated fashion statement, and now so widespread that, in the twilight of his premiership, with his usual control-freak instincts, Tony Blair mused on the possibility of banning hooded sweatshirts in order to prevent “anti-social behaviour” and restore “respect on our streets.”
But “respect” is a two-way street. And on Britain’s two-way streets, where the government cameras whir 24-7, the security state signals its contempt for the citizen. And, needless to say, if the Big Blairite Brother had banned “hoodies,” British youth could easily have adopted the burka as the uniform of alienated youth, and Her Majesty’s government wouldn’t have done a thing about it. Mr. Blair’s one-time deputy, an Old Labour bruiser called John Prescott, was once approached at a motorway caff by a gang of hooded yoofs anxious to beat him up and (in a touch of artistic symmetry) videotape the encounter: in a sense, they were proposing to demonstrate their “respect” for CCTV Britain by shooting their own CCTV footage.
So CCTV isn’t simply a new “technique,” as, say, fingerprinting once was. It makes a larger statement about what’s happened to a land that was once, as Daniel Silva acknowledges, the crucible of liberty. Henry Porter’s new novel The Dying Light is set mainly in an English market town in Shropshire that feels as claustrophobic as Communist East Germany, a land in which rural coppers badger you for such amorphous offences as “failing to account for your intentions in a designated area.” Returning to her native sod from a job in New York, the heroine can’t help noticing that there’s “more surveillance than I thought possible in a free country,” and yet the citizenry are quiescent. The Prime Minister is struck by Oliver Cromwell’s choice of job description, “Great Lord Protector”: “That is exactly what you feel leading the country: an acute desire to protect the people”—for the best of motives.
Earlier this year, Greater Manchester Police introduced “Smart Cars”—little bubble vehicles equipped with rotating cameras on 12-foot poles poking through their roofs. As the BBC reported, “Anyone seen driving while distracted—eating at the wheel, playing with the radio or applying makeup for instance—is filmed by the cameras.” Shortly thereafter, they get a letter and a fine.
Henry Porter’s political thriller nudges that on just a wee bit: unmanned four-camera mini-drones sail the skies, tracking the wayward “citizen” even in the remotest thickets of the country. What next? CCTV in private homes? Ah, but we’re already there. This month the “Secretary of State for Children” (another Orwellian touch) announced that 20,000 “problem families” would be put under 24-hour CCTV supervision in their homes. As the Daily Express reported, “They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.”
Orwell’s government “telescreen” in every home is close to being a reality, although even he might have dismissed as too obviously absurd a nanny state that literally polices your bedtime.
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