Warnings from history: one in an occasional series

Robert McCrum is a very important man these days, in media circles at least. No, make that 'in liberal bourgeois media circles', which isn't quite the same thing. He's an associate editor of the Observer, former editor-in-chief of Faber and Faber, and a big cheese in literary reviewing. A taste-maker for the chattering classes, of whom I am decidedly one (except for the income, London pad, Tuscan villa and Cotswolds bolt-hole).

But Mr McCrum is also a novelist, and in 1980 he published In The Secret State, and hailed by Auberon Waugh no less as 'A major talent in the world of thrillers'. Lots of literary types think they have a thriller in them: Jonathan Freedland writes tosh as Sam Bourne, JK Rowling was recently outed as apparently rather good thriller-author Robert Galbraith, and Mark Lawson has written several accomplished novels. Perhaps McCrum thought that all journalists should be capable of churning out a novel. Or perhaps he has a political axe to grind which can only be fully explored in fiction: I came across In The Secret State while looking for novels by politicians.

Certainly In The Secret State is a deeply political novel. Its central protagonists are Frank Strange and James Quitman (most of the characters have unsubtly suggestive names): Strange is the unfairly-deposed head of a British intelligence division, and Quitman is his diffident junior torn between loyalty to Strange and the department when they come into conflict. It's all very sub-le Carré: strange could be a lazy first draft of a Smiley novel. The characterisation is limited and the scene-setting (unavoidably, I suppose) dated: the love interest is 'doing well' in PR. We know this because she drives a company Ford Cortina in 'shiny red'. Secretaries are conniving little sex-pots, and computer operations have to be described to us in considerable detail.

And yet it's not a bad novel, despite structural and literary flaws. The main interest is the background, which is late-70s Britain's perceived decline. Bombs are going off, the deep state is turning fascist and treasonous, the body politic has turned septic as suspicion and selfishness fester. McCrum, like le Carré, rejects simplistic Reds-under-the-Bed stuff, preferring to examine the consequences of a security apparatus which decides for itself what constitutes the national interest, and what means are acceptable for preferred ends. In a sense, it's a very British version of an essentially American genre: the oppressive government (Europeans tend to fear corporations more than their governments).
What's really interesting about McCrum's novel is its interest in information processing and harvesting. Some passages could be plonked into a modern spy novel without much editing at all:

'I'm getting frightened by the state we all live in now… Census records, school records, health records, social security records, political records: I don't think most people realise how much personal information is collected by the department… The power we have over people, that's what's frightening, Frank'.
     'Don't you believe in the safeguards?'
     'I wish I could. But the security forces we serve are beyond Parliament… There's no accountability worth speaking of. … Take our data-gathering programme. There's no stopping it. Each scrap of data leads to another piece of data. It gathers momentum of its own accord'.

And later on:

'I'm not just talking about simple census facts, age, sex and so on, but also political behaviour, personal spending patterns, travel, in fact almost a day-by-day, characteristic-by-characteristic record of movements, affiliations and behaviour of all listed individuals… every time we have one of those "emergencies" more and more civil liberties get curtailed without a single protest, freedoms that were won by generations of agitation. I mean the enlargement of police powers… the corruption of the jury system in state trials, and the illicit surveillance of so-called subversives. That's what happens in the secret state'. 

The only unconvincing aspect of this last speech is, sadly, that it's delivered by a left-wing Labour MP determined to stand up for civil liberties: one of the most depressing things of the last 30 years is Labour's mutation into a disgustingly authoritarian party in thrall to the security services of government and the private sector.

Apart from that, everything McCrum writes has become true. He writes of the police infiltrating pressure groups and inciting them to commit atrocities:

'This is an old Nazi trick. It justifies the emergency measures the department is taking these days, and, as it were, proves the claims made…about the threat to our society'

In our own time, policemen adopted dead babies' names to infiltrate and even lead the activities of law-abiding pressure groups, fathering children to further the trick and committing perjury. All without oversight. They decided who were the subversives (people campaigning for better fast food, and the parents of a murdered black boy), without anyone to deny them. They decided what constituted subversion and normality, a deeply political act, and played hardball opposition, knowing that nobody would every contradict them. Elsewhere, Prism and Tempora collect and analyse every phone call, tweet, text-message and Facebook update. Secret trials, under the name 'closed material procedures' replace open jury trials when the state has something of which to be ashamed.

The only trick McCrum missed was the intervention of the private sector. The bad guys in his novel have been using state assets to trade with terrorists, arms dealers etc for money.

'Information is a sort of currency like anything else, it just happens that Preece has had free access to rather a lot of it. Preece has supplied trading banks, large companies and multinationals with confidential data. He has sold personal information about prominent people without their knowledge. He has also worked as an agent for other private data-accumulating organizations which, as you know, are not restrained by law'.

The more the crisis of British society grows, the greater will be the temptation to enlarge the programme. The problem is that Hayter is not an elected politician, but a bureaucrat whose powers and behaviour are accountable to no one…

The British state hasn't changed in this regard. The deep, unelected state tames ministers. Defenders of civil liberties during election campaigns (as Labour, the Lib Dems and even the Conservatives have been in recent memory) become enthralled by the mystery and horror presented them by the civil service, or by the apocalyptic visions of a US whose demands can never be refused. And besides, what politician or spy is ever going to refuse more information?

What has changed is that we don't need Preece any longer. The customers are the same as in 1980, but we've become our own agents, whoring ourselves round the corporations without a single thought for the ramifications. . The private sector has built a far greater surveillance system than any government every could. Rather than trawl through our activity, they facilitate it. We hand over every single detail of our lives, from where we are, who we're talking to, what are our deepest fantasies, how we vote, whom we shag and everything else: without a moment's thought. And they in turn hand it over to governments and to private corporations to make sure we remain obedient little consumers. I have no doubt at all that any of you could work out my name, email address and work address in moments, given the clues scattered carelessly about this blog.

If you read this, you'll be on a list.

Afternoon, readers.

I'm afraid that despite the momentous events of the week, I'm slightly devoid of pungent opinions. Too much going on at work. Mostly boring to the outside world, and some very sad, such as my friend's stroke. No news on that front today. Instead, I've been in meetings about pensions (generally bad news) and the regular union negotiating committee session. An interesting mixed bag as always, but in general a depressing view of how the senior management operates. However, I've now been elected to the university's Board of Governors, so I'm looking forward to seeing how oversight operates from that perspective.

Most of the week's outside news doesn't surprise me in the slightest because I read the newspapers and I'm a socialist. Police spying on dead mens' families? UK security agencies hoovering up every single communication? Law-abiding campaign groups riddled with police informers to the extent that cops wrote their material, in some cases kept the organisations going, and fathered children with activists before disappearing? Cops conducting spying missions against their perceived political opponents? Awful, awful behaviour. But not in the least surprising.

Now and then British newspapers publish stories about Over There. Terrible countries – Iran, North Korea, Russia, East Germany etc. – in which governments vet educational materials, spy on their citizens, operate secret courts and possess fearsome secret police forces which serve the political establishment rather than the people.

The plain fact is that Over There is really Over Here. Our schools are being handed over to corporate interests without a murmur of complaint. The UK has secret courts, boringly disguised as Closed Material Procedures. The Education Secretary and the Prime Minister personally write the curriculum, particularly for History because those with no memories have no means of cultural resistance. Anyone with any knowledge of leftwing politics, Northern Ireland (or indeed Scottish and Welsh nationalism) is well aware that beyond helping old ladies cross the road, the police services in this country are the reactionary lackeys of the ruling classes. In previous decades, they were merely corrupt, especially the Metropolitan Police, but they became politicised by the Miners' Strike (150 arrests at Orgreave: no convictions as it turned out that the cops faked their statements), Hillsborough, by Northern Ireland and by the Thatcher Government, by the shrieking neofascism of the Sun and the Daily Mail. Any light shone on Special Branch and its sub-groups, and the Security Services, reveals bodies with absolutely no political neutrality. They aren't interested in right wing, capitalist and racist subversives: their enemies are environmentalists, anti-racists, ethnic minorities and the poor. The permanent state is authoritarian and capitalist and its foot-soldiers operate to ensure that the arms dealers, bankers and uniformed services are never scrutinised, let alone overseen by the likes of us.

All this is one of the reasons I read science fiction: so much of it extrapolates from the assumption that state and corporate forces will always do whatever's technically possible, regardless of the law. Given the means to record every tweet, email and phone call, they will. States – of any complexion – fear their citizens, and rightly so. They aren't scared of each other in any real sense, they're scared of us. Luckily for them, most of us don't care in the slightest. Politics is boring and we're busy. We accept reassurances like Hague's that only guilty people are monitored: something that's not technically possible and it assumes that the natural state in which to exist is the Panopticon: that all instincts for privacy are automatically suspect.

Thomas Jefferson said that a situation in which the people fear the government is tyranny, whereas liberty exists when the government fear the people. He's now wrong. We don't fear the government: hegemony has manufactured consent, largely by persuading people that the subversives are Them: the Muslim bomber, the environmental activist, the Edward Snowdens of this world. In the modern tyranny, we've taken the free gifts: Twitter, Gmail, The Voice, CCTV, credit cards and mobile phones, without question. In the modern tyranny, the government fears us, and it acts on those fears to the fullest extent of its capabilities. The state doesn't have specific fears (the Irish, the ALF, Islamic terrorists). It has one general fear: that there are things it doesn't know. And yet when it comes to things it should know, it fails every time. MI6 was as shocked as everyone else when the USSR collapsed. Nobody knew the banks were lying, cheating and stealing. And yet the Met knew whether or not the Lawrence's friends had ever been on demonstrations or joined political parties.

I've always assumed that any campaign group is riddled with police officers, however anodyne the cause. They aren't detecting crime or disorder: they're conducting political surveillance. There's no other earthly reason to spy on Stephen Lawrence's grieving parents other than to destroy the credibility of their criticisms of the police. Perhaps I'm overly paranoid, but it does seem like the state and corporate bodies (this week revealed to have bugged and hacked their way across the country without any legal action at all: instead, the cops covered it up). Stand up for badgers and you'll be infiltrated before you can staple a placard, but Corporate Security Providers have carte blanche to do whatever they want: and yet last time I looked, business had bankrupted the country.

I said earlier that I'm a socialist. This means that I'm saddened by this state of affairs. In a socialist society, governments are a good thing. They're set up by the people as an efficient and fair means of distributing wealth and protecting themselves. Socialists don't trust corporations to do it, and believe that collective action is better than individualism. But because governments have power, expertise and stability, they attract the wrong kind of people and develop a tendency towards omniscience and omnipotence. Smarter socialists are aware of this, and believe in distributed power: grass-roots decision-making and the like. Some tend towards municipal socialism, others towards anarchism. But I still think we need governments. I've just read Cory Doctorow's interesting novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (he's posted it for free here, though I bought the book), which posits a society that's replaced money with accrued respect, and 'ad hoc' coalitions running everything from Disney Land to transport networks. It's a lovely semi-anarchist vision, but it's based entirely on the assumption that there are unlimited resources and – for the most part – general good will: the novel cheerfully just states that energy and resources are infinite and carries on from there. Back in the real world, we need democratic governments to referee the competing demands of its citizens (or you just need to put me in charge). But this is a Utopian vision: what we actually get is governments behaving oppressively as a means of self-preservation, or because it openly declines to serve the interests of its people, preferring instead to (in the case of the UK government) serve the US and the markets.

Radio 4 is currently running a series of programmes about British Dystopian entertainments called Dangerous Visions. Seems to me we don't need to imagine them. We're in it.

That Friday feeling

So there I was, lounging around in bed at 7 a.m. like a lazy beached whale, when I realised that today is FRIDAY. And FRIDAY this week means MEET PAUL UPPAL MP! In the flesh!  Seriously, the great man actually in his constituency and ready to meet REAL constituents who aren't the ones who express themselves in parliamentary terminology and aren't at all the figments of Pompous Paul's imagination!

And then I remembered. He's cancelled on us. We were meant to present him with the 38 Degrees petition against the government's proposed new surveillance legislation. He agreed to allow two people (very generous) for ten minutes, as long as no photography was allowed.

Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking

'But Vole, the new legislation allows the government to harvest every phone call, tweet, email, letter and pigeon post people in Britain send. So why, in the name of all that's holy, would an MP not want his photograph taken? That's really weird. It's like he doesn't like being a public figure. It's a bit hypocritical isn't it? Why would an MP vote to make sure everybody in the country is spied on all the time, but be so shy? Isn't that just a teensy bit eccentric? To say the least? And anyway, didn't the Lib Dems and Tories make an awful lot of election promises about ending the Labour Party's authoritarian, unconstitutional, repressive surveillance state? Because this sounds very like an actual, y'know, extension of their Orwellian habits.'

And I have to say, I'm with you. I met him once before, at a public meeting. I took a photograph. He sent his teenage goons over to demand to know who I was and what I was doing. Then he came over and rather rudely repeated his questions. Was I press? What was I going to do with the photograph? Why was I taking notes? Did I have any ID? In the end I had to point out that most MPs want to be shown hard at work in the constituency. I know, for a man who wants the state to spy on all of us, all of the time, he's got a finely developed sense of irony.

Sadly, there'll be no repeat today. Paul's cancelled because a close relative has died. Still, we're going to have a short meeting in the rain outside the bereaved parliamentarian's office. I'm as sad as you are that I'm denied the chance to meet the city's most upstanding and hardworking public representatives, but there'll be other chances.

Walsalls have ears

Some detective work has revealed the extent of state spying on citizens. The Labour government shared one thing with the USSR, and unfortunately, it wasn't socialism. Instead, it adopted the surveillance society which is weird, as it demonstrates their core Tory values. Toryism holds that people are essentially evil and need restraining, which authorises repression (there are some libertarian Tories, who are evil in other ways).

Labour allowed basically any public body to covertly observe citizens - surveillance has been carried out to catch people faking their addresses to get their kids into 'better' schools, people using the wrong recycling bill, even, in Liverpool, spying on anti-crime wardens.

In Bromley the council even spied on a charity shop to see if people were "fly-tipping" their donations at the door.

Quis custodiet, and all that? 4.5% of operations resulted in prosecutions, which gives you an idea of the trivialities pursued using long lenses, listening devices and flowers with cameras in the middle (I may have made the last bit up).

Walsall, a nondescript place near The Dark Place, comes third, with 215 applications to spy on people in the last couple of years.

There should be a simple rule: if it's not a criminal offence, it doesn't justify spies. If it is a criminal offence, the police should carry out surveillance. They're not perfect, but they at least know the rules in most cases.

Bad Algorithm

I use Amazon a lot, as there's only a Waterstone's in my town. Yet I really, strongly resent their automated recommendation e-mails, which purport to 'know' my tastes, yet are usually way off the mark.

I once got an e-mail from it on Valentine's Day starting with the words 'Dear customer, Amazon loves you'. Really? Do you think that I'd have acquired a girlfriend that year by sending her a card reading 'Dear single female, Vole loves you. Send some money and something approaching sentiment can be arranged?'. After all the money I've spent at Amazon, you'd think they'd know my name by now. I bet even prostitutes can do better than that.

It didn't help that I used Amazon to look up the ISBN for Katie Price's Pony Care book (a present, before you ask), and now receive an awful lot of promotional offers on books by or about Katie Price and/or horses.

Today's missive somehow decided that because I bought a book on Prime Ministers and the media, logically my next read should be one on genealogy. Well, it's all words… And I've never heard of the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival. Surveillance - they can watch us all the time, but they can never know us.

As someone who has purchased or rated Where Power Lies: Prime Ministers V the Media by Lance Price or other books in the Content Stores > The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2010 category, you might like to know that Nick Barratt's Beginner's Guide to Your Ancestors Lives will be released on 18 March 2010

Don't let the buggers get you down

In case you missed it, the News of the World spent lots of money bugging lots of peoples' phones (illegally, of course). Not the phones of evil-doers, of course - investigative journalism isn't really that paper's forte. No, they hacked into the voicemail of sports players, minor royals and micro-celebs. For some reason, they did it it Gordon Taylor, head of the footballers' trade union, the PFA - and paid him £1m to shut up about it. One of their journalists went to prison for hacking into some prince's phone, and they claimed it was an isolated case. The editor, Andy Coulson, unconvincingly claimed that he knew nothing about it, but resigned anyway. Guess where he is now! He's David Cameron's director of communications! Ironically, given his party's clamour about Gordon Brown's alleged bullying, one of his journalists was paid £800,000 compensation for 'persistent bullying' by… Andy Coulson!

Er… the Guardian found that 91 people had been hacked, that the police knew, and did nothing about it.

Now the Parliamentary Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport has issued a big report on privacy and the press, with a large section on Murdoch's paper. They condemn the paper for being obstructive and imply that the paper's executives lied to them, and criticise the police for not wanting to do a proper investigation.

What's News International's response? That the report is a political conspiracy between the Guardian and the Committee - not natural bedfellows given that the chairman is a Tory. It's an important report for media/cultural studies students because it raises issues about morality, journalistic ethics and justification and about press regulation. The Press Complaints Committee is run by the newspapers and is notoriously useless - but would you want a state committee overseeing what goes into the papers?

A Mark Thomas on every corner

In which a loudmouth gets the better of the police - who obviously apologise gracefully