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Saturday 7 April 2012

How to build a police state in two very easy steps

How to build a police state in two easy steps PDF Print E-mail
Written by Elite Commander
April 2012

freedom2_120_x_172Secret courts – what next?

Things are deteriorating rapidly now.

It was less than a week ago that Cameron’s government announced its plans to spy on every email, text message, phone call and website visit of everyone in the country. But now the situation is even worse.

Now they’re talking about secret courts.

A secret court hearing means, obviously, that the trial is unobservable to the public, ostensibly in the interests of protecting intelligence vital to national security. This may well be a legitimate concern. However, the problem arises when this power is abused; when there really is no ‘intelligence’ at risk of disclosure and the secrecy of the court is used to persecute dissidents.

Unnecessary government surveillance and secret court hearings are two of the most immediately recognisable features of a police state – along with other things:

  • Arbitrary detention without trial
  • Super-injunction gagging orders, where you’re not even allowed to know there is a gagging order
  • Talk of compulsory ID cards and DNA registration
  • Internet censorship and blocking
  • Labelling political opponents as ‘terrorists’
  • Snatching of children by the state in secret courtrooms where you are innocent until proven guilty
  • ‘Hate speech’ laws suppressing free speech, prompting the detention of political prisoners
  • Arbitrary extradition to other countries for crimes you may not have committed

Beginning to sound familiar?

As bad as things seem, however, once again, the comments on the BBC’s Have Your Say section (they really couldn’t find an excuse not to open it up for this article) are highly encouraging. The vast majority of people have no desire for secret courts and governments monitoring their every activity. There was a particularly profound response from one commenter, who said:

An English lady who lived in Nazi Germany talked about it on the World at War series

‘It didn't all happen at once.

It happened slowly, in a drip drip drip manner over many years until eventually you found yourself being directly affected by Nazi policies’

Most folk in the UK are too busy either blindy[sic] obeying their masters or watching BGTalent to care what happens

Bye bye Britain

This is identical to what will happen to us. As our liberties are eroded bit by bit, our people will not notice what is happening until the very end, when it’s too late. They, except for a small, bright, motivated minority, will do nothing until it is impossible to do anything. So what does the future hold for us? Maybe in a few years it will even be illegal to criticise the main three parties. The establishment has already shown across Europe that it’s willing to ban opposition parties if they start to get too popular.

This means we must do something. A few days ago I posted a similar article about the new plans for monitoring laws, and we received an admiral response from patriotic, freedom-cherishing readers who signed the petition – and a less than enthusiastic response from readers who didn’t think it mattered enough. E-petitions may be a red herring but what else are you doing?

The ‘Scrap Plans to Monitor all Emails and Web Usage’ e-petition is only at 8,825 signatures at the time of writing. This is not enough to force a Commons debate before May, when the laws are announced. If you haven’t signed it already, please go do so now, then come back.

Paul Golding linked me to the 38Degrees site, which also has a petition running, currently with many more signatures. I don’t know if there are rules about signing two different petitions, but here is the link.

There seems to be no e-petition on the government website for the secret courts idea. This could be because there already are petitions of a similar nature and ‘duplicates’ are rejected – since these older petitions have very few signatures and much nearer closing dates, I suggest you write to your MP voicing your concerns (it can't hurt).

Please comment here and in Action Stations if you have done anything to slow the onslaught of the Democratic Republic of Britain.