Big Brother isn't watching us — but don't relax

The following article appears in The Times tomorrow.

CZESLAW MILOSZ, one of the noblest minds in the politics and literature of the past century, died on Saturday. In a long life he was both participant and sage in the conflict between the constitutional democracies of the West and communist totalitarianism. Having served as a cultural attaché in the Polish embassies in Paris and Washington, Milosz defected in 1951. The reasons he expounded were memorable. He declared that in communist societies writers had to “renounce the truth completely” even while daily observing “human tragedies in comparison with which the tragedies of antiquity pale into insignificance”.

It is unlikely that these words were in the mind of the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, when in an interview in yesterday’s Times he claimed that Britain risked emulating the type of society that Milosz escaped. The commissioner holds a useful but limited post — that of observing constraints in the State’s collection of information. But he appears to have set out to discredit it through trivial observation couched in extravagant rhetoric.

“I don’t want to start talking paranoia language,” said Mr Thomas, his indifference between noun and adjective serving as a cipher for his wider confusions, “but data protection has a strong continental European flavour. Some of my counterparts in Eastern Europe, in Spain, have experienced in the last century what can happen when government gets too powerful and has too much information on citizens.”

It turned out that the outrages the commissioner had in mind were government proposals for identity cards, a population register and a national database of juveniles.

How much information a democracy should amass on its citizens is plainly important. When we know that some British citizens support terrorist groups, then the balance between personal liberty and national security may need to be reassessed. There is a plausible case that better information would reduce the State’s intrusiveness for the peaceable, while circumscribing the activities of the malevolent. More widely, as governments have duties beyond public order and national security, welfare, for example, they require accurate records of earnings and employment.

None of the main parties shows much seriousness in this discussion. New Labour, while commendably concerned with the advancement of sexual freedom, has shown itself consistently obtuse in observing the bounds of legitimate authority in other matters of personal choice. The Conservatives disingenuously proclaim libertarian ends while promoting intervention on behalf of sectional interests, such as motorists. The Liberal Democrats rival the Information Commissioner for the enervating evasions of unthinking populism: commenting on Mr Thomas’s warnings, the party’s home affairs spokesman, Mark Oaten, cocked his tin ear and helpfully lamented “the danger . . . that we are slipping into a Big Brother society by stealth”.

Yet ironically it is the pedestrian quality of mainstream politicians’ interventions that provides reassurance that the issue is marginal, a discussion about where the boundaries properly lie between privacy and civic obligation. Lacking sharply-defined ideological differences, Westminster politics has little sense of the malign, let alone totalitarian, as opposed to illiberal or merely incompetent, exercise of power.

The Information Commissioner offers a peculiarly British lament: it’s impossible to believe that he has thought much about the character of totalitarian societies, and in invoking their example he illustrates the parochial character of his concerns.

Exactly 20 years ago a writer who genuinely understood the character of totalitarianism, the Sovietologist Leopold Labedz wrote an apprehensive essay on the reputation of George Orwell. Throughout the year 1984 Orwell was the stuff of newspaper cliché about the characteristics of modern societies that his most celebrated novel had supposedly anticipated. Labedz counterposed Orwell’s metaphor for the character of totalitarian rule — “a boot stamping on a human face — forever” — with the observations of political and media commentators about . . . nothing in particular.

Among the culprits Labedz cited was the ever-superficial television anchorman Walter Cronkite, who in a two-hour documentary to mark Orwell’s achievement, apparently managed to avoid even a single mention of communism. To Cronkite, 1984 was just a jeremiad against technology. Unsurprisingly, given the advances in computing power, the spread of television, the use of polygraphs and so on, Cronkite found disquieting parallels with modern industrial societies.

Of this type of reasoning Labedz was scornful: “For Orwell the problem was the technology of power rather than the power of technology.” Orwell’s book’s aim was not to depict a science-fiction dystopia, but an actually existing state whose ideological millenarianism posed a threat to the values Orwell exemplified.

Historical parallels are always inexact and frequently a device for avoiding critical inquiry. But it is beyond serious argument that the Western democracies today contend with a totalitarian idea that is literally and not only metaphorically apocalyptic. The forces of theocratic totalitarianism aim at the destruction of Western civilisation and its replacement by a restored Caliphate. Armed with technologies that they must never secure, they could in principle inflict grievous harm on us and our way of life. The more our public servants talk of totalitarianism without really meaning it, the less serious will that threat be taken. That really would be, as the Information Commissioner put it, “a danger, yes”.