Leftwing intelligentsia justify more power and bigger government

Such is the case with Johann Hari's latest article. Millions of moderate Britains are more than alarmed at their socialist government's plot to build a central database in Whitehall that will store personal and private details of every single living human in Britain, so that every single apparatus in his vastly bloated government will have access to more information than ever before.

No piece of information will remain private, and many fear that it will not remain very secure either, given how efficient and reliable government facilities are known to be.

A central database is, and always has been identified, as one step closer to tyranny and one step further away from liberty and freedom. As the size of the British government expands, it approaches the kind of society described by Orwell in his prophetic novels. Perhaps soon, the government will install GPS locators into every criminal, or perhaps even every newborn child to track and monitor them.

Finally, British people are fed up with being controlled and brainwashed by their overlords and are fiercely resisting the proposed measure. But Johann Hari wants them all to just breathe easy and hand over their personal details to government (as if it weren't enough that they hand over one third of their property in the form of taxes !).

And as Britain takes a step closer towards fascism, Johann describes this unprecedented invasion of government into people's private lives as something benign:

The Prime Minister is proposing to make it easier for government departments to share information. The Department for Work and Pensions will be able to find out from the Department of Health which pensioners are so sick they count as disabled, so they can give them the hundreds of extra pounds they are entitled to every month. The Housing Department will be able to find families who are slipping and sliding into financial chaos and help them out before they turn up at their local town hall one day, clutching their kids and some hastily-stuffed boxes, after being evicted. The Land Registry will be able to catch more middle-class people who cheat on their council tax returns by not declaring home extensions. If it succeeds – as it has in most democratic countries – the state machinery will become smoother, faster and more efficient.

You've gotta be kidding. This man is completely blind to the repeated and characteristic failures that plague all government actions. Good intentions count for nothing, when a detached faceless bureaucrat is in charge of your personal life, preferences, property and actions.

Johann Hari shows what happens when you give socialists one inch.. they demand more and more control. They clearly have to deal with the reality with the facts on the ground, and that they don't live in a utopia. It shows that all forms of government regulation and control tried to date have failed, but the pure fanatics like Johann say "bring it on !! we need even more !"

The man is intoxicated with large government. He didn't see what happened to China and Russia, and what is still happening to Cuba and North Korea, when they overdosed on socialist ideology. The hangover will last a long time, perhaps many generations.

The seventies pop-screecher Leo Sayer announced last week that living in the Celebrity Big Brother House is “like being in Abu Graib”. When another contestant pointed out that the tortured Iraqis weren’t being paid hundreds of thousands of pounds and didn’t have the option of popping into the diary room for a chat, he conceded. “Okay, I see what you mean,” he said. “It’s more like Guanatanomo Bay.”

I don’t know why everyone laughed. The people who will ritually jerk their knees today by declaring that Tony Blair’s proposals for a simple centralised Whitehall database are “a step towards tyranny” sound startlingly similar.

The Prime Minister is proposing to make it easier for government departments to share information. The Department for Work and Pensions will be able to find out from the Department of Health which pensioners are so sick they count as disabled, so they can give them the hundreds of extra pounds they are entitled to every month. The Housing Department will be able to find families who are slipping and sliding into financial chaos and help them out before they turn up at their local town hall one day, clutching their kids and some hastily-stuffed boxes, after being evicted. The Land Registry will be able to catch more middle-class people who cheat on their council tax returns by not declaring home extensions. If it succeeds – as it has in most democratic countries – the state machinery will become smoother, faster and more efficient.

Yet these proposals are already being presented by the Conservatives – and many on the left – as yet another step into 1984, part of a proto-tyrannical package ranging from CCTV cameras to ASBOs to the DNA database that they cite as evidence Britain is “sleepwalking into a surveillance society”.

Most of the people who are tetchy and tense at news of more government powers are good people with good worries. Blair’s government has abused civil liberties. They reintroduced internment, and only ditched it in favour of the almost-as-awful house arrest because the House of Lords forced them to. They allowed British airspace to be used to “render” human beings for torture in secret US prisons in Eastern Europe. They slashed back jury trials. They imprisoned refugees and their children in camps, for the “crime” of seeking asylum. They tried to criminalize fierce criticism of religion. I wouldn’t trust that old Stalinist John Reid with a kitten, never mind fundamental freedoms – so everything the government proposes needs to be scrutinised carefully.

But there is a danger that, in response to these real abuses, we have ended up with a right-wing reflex reaction. If we assume all state action undermines human freedom, we will end up opposing smart measures that help people along with the ones that cause real harm.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously drew a distinction between “negative liberty” and “positive liberty”. Negative liberty is freedom from interference by the state. Positive liberty is freedom to achieve your goals – and sometimes, that requires help from the state. Most of us have now sunk into an unspoken belief in negative liberty alone. When we hear the government is acting, we automatically assume there is something to be feared – as though government can only take liberty, and never help us to achieve it.

Look.. the state knows nothing about my goals. I'd like them to stay out of my life. Johann Hari could never convince millions of us that we are better off submitting to an all-powerful central authority with a supreme leader, even if he has good intentions and says he will help us out.

Stay out of our lives socialist scum !!