The State’s Attack on its People

September 7, 2021

As the first light of dawn begins to lighten the sky there comes a hammering on your door. In burst a gang of state officials to ransack your home, office or both; computers, phones, all internet connection and storage devices along with anything else they can lay their hands on, is seized and taken from you. It is a scenario we associate with China or the former USSR – Russia, the KGB and East Germany as it was under the Stasi.

But it is also the United Kingdom in 2021.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is the apparently independent ‘data watchdog’ and claims to ‘uphold information rights in the public interest’ and ‘promote openness by public bodies’. Yet this is also the organisation that, last July, using little-known and used powers, sent its officials to raid two properties looking for ‘evidence’ against whistleblowers they suspect of leaking the images of former health secretary Matt Hancock with his married mistress.

The unmissed and unlamented Hancock had spent more than a year bossing ordinary people about, laying down ever-more oppressive laws while ignoring them himself – betraying his own family and the country. What could be more in the public interest than exposing such a fraudulent man? Whoever brought the images to the attention of a free press did the people of the UK a huge service. Had they not, the hypocritical Hancock would still be groping his mistress before wiping the lipstick from his visage and snapping ‘Hands, Face, Space!’ at the rest of us.

Without whistleblowers, we may never have come to know of some of the greatest scandals of our time. And the IOC is not the only state organisation roaming the country hunting down those of whom they disapprove. The police are the most obvious and dawn raids happen every day. They have been for years. And at a time when so many are working from home, such seizures of internet equipment are unforgiveable.

News that the government wants to extend the Coronavirus Act yet again, news that so-called ‘vaccine passports’ will be brought in to use and that another lockdown ‘may be necessary’ comes as no surprise to many. And the only way to enforce these laws will be to crush the people still further. It is a tactic out of the Mafia handbook: mess with us and we will mess with you.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson had a golden opportunity to cement his place as a buccaneering leader of a global Britain – yet he and those he has chosen to be ministers have squandered it.