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The following was spoken by Philip Pullman @ a Civil Liberties conference on 1st March 2009. According to this site the piece was put up on the timesonline website - but later removed.  Therefore it seemed a sensible thing to share it, so others can read it and hear an opinion.  After all, it’s a free country - isn’t it?
©Philip Pullman 2009

Are such things done on Albion’s shore?
The image of this nation that haunts me most powerfully is that of the sleeping giant Albion in William Blake’s prophetic books. Sleep, profound and inveterate slumber: that is the condition of Britain today.

We do not know what is happening to us. In the world outside, great events take place, great figures move and act, great matters unfold, and this nation of Albion murmurs and stirs while malevolent voices whisper in the darkness - the voices of the new laws that are silently strangling the old freedoms the nation still dreams it enjoys.

We are so fast asleep that we don’t know who we are any more. Are we English? Scottish? Welsh? British? More than one of them? One but not another? Are we a Christian nation - after all we have an Established Church - or are we something post-Christian? Are we a secular state? Are we a multifaith state? Are we anything we can all agree on and feel proud of?
BACKGROUND

* £34bn cost of state-run surveillance databases

* Former spy chief says UK is now a police state

* First ID cards are to be issued within weeks

* COMMENT: that’s a bit rich, Dame Stella

The new laws whisper:

You don’t know who you are

You’re mistaken about yourself

We know better than you do what you consist of, what labels apply to you, which facts about you are important and which are worthless

We do not believe you can be trusted to know these things, so we shall know them for you

And if we take against you, we shall remove from your possession the only proof we shall allow to be recognised

The sleeping nation dreams it has the freedom to speak its mind. It fantasises about making tyrants cringe with the bluff bold vigour of its ancient right to express its opinions in the street. This is what the new laws say about that:

Expressing an opinion is a dangerous activity

Whatever your opinions are, we don’t want to hear them

So if you threaten us or our friends with your opinions we shall treat you like the rabble you are

And we do not want to hear you arguing about it

So hold your tongue and forget about protesting

What we want from you is acquiescence

The nation dreams it is a democratic state where the laws were made by freely elected representatives who were answerable to the people. It used to be such a nation once, it dreams, so it must be that nation still. It is a sweet dream.

You are not to be trusted with laws

So we shall put ourselves out of your reach

We shall put ourselves beyond your amendment or abolition

You do not need to argue about any changes we make, or to debate them, or to send your representatives to vote against them

You do not need to hold us to account

You think you will get what you want from an inquiry?

Who do you think you are?

What sort of fools do you think we are?

The nation’s dreams are troubled, sometimes; dim rumours reach our sleeping ears, rumours that all is not well in the administration of justice; but an ancient spell murmurs through our somnolence, and we remember that the courts are bound to seek the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and we turn over and sleep soundly again.

And the new laws whisper:

We do not want to hear you talking about truth

Truth is a friend of yours, not a friend of ours

We have a better friend called hearsay, who is a witness we can always rely on

We do not want to hear you talking about innocence

Innocent means guilty of things not yet done

We do not want to hear you talking about the right to silence

You need to be told what silence means: it means guilt

We do not want to hear you talking about justice

Justice is whatever we want to do to you

And nothing else

Are we conscious of being watched, as we sleep? Are we aware of an ever-open eye at the corner of every street, of a watching presence in the very keyboards we type our messages on? The new laws don’t mind if we are. They don’t think we care about it.

We want to watch you day and night

We think you are abject enough to feel safe when we watch you

We can see you have lost all sense of what is proper to a free people

We can see you have abandoned modesty

Some of our friends have seen to that

They have arranged for you to find modesty contemptible

In a thousand ways they have led you to think that whoever does not want to be watched must have something shameful to hide

We want you to feel that solitude is frightening and unnatural

We want you to feel that being watched is the natural state of things

One of the pleasant fantasies that consoles us in our sleep is that we are a sovereign nation, and safe within our borders. This is what the new laws say about that:

We know who our friends are

And when our friends want to have words with one of you

We shall make it easy for them to take you away to a country where you will learn that you have more fingernails than you need

It will be no use bleating that you know of no offence you have committed under British law

It is for us to know what your offence is

Angering our friends is an offence

It is inconceivable to me that a waking nation in the full consciousness of its freedom would have allowed its government to pass such laws as the Protection from Harassment Act (1997), the Crime and Disorder Act (1998), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000), the Terrorism Act (2000), the Criminal Justice and Police Act (2001), the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (2001), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Extension Act (2002), the Criminal Justice Act (2003), the Extradition Act (2003), the Anti-Social Behaviour Act (2003), the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act (2004), the Civil Contingencies Act (2004), the Prevention of Terrorism Act (2005), the Inquiries Act (2005), the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (2005), not to mention a host of pending legislation such as the Identity Cards Bill, the Coroners and Justice Bill, and the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.

Inconceivable.

And those laws say:

Sleep, you stinking cowards

Sweating as you dream of rights and freedoms

Freedom is too hard for you

We shall decide what freedom is

Sleep, you vermin

Sleep, you scum.

I thought I best write a short post on the announcement given on Wednesday, and pushed by Tom Baker MP - that the government are now going to be proactively supporting Open Source to lower costs in government.

The policy document is fairly basic to read, and fails to go into massive depth regarding what actions are actually going to be taken.  However, it is a ‘policy’ document, rather than an implementation document.  All change is a migration (you’ve got to be someplace else to move towards something) and I expect the migration to take some time.  However, there are some good noises coming out of the government - so here’s hoping.

One of the things I’ve been most impressed with, is the aggregation of users comments as a method to gauge reaction to the announcement.  Using a netvibes page, the government are collating information from blogs, microblogging sites, and new sites, using the #ukgovoss tag.  It’s a neat method, and one I hope they continue to leverage in the future.

However, the government have talked about collaboration and more ‘open’ co-operation before - the ‘e-gif’ framework.  Whilst essentially a good idea, it was also a prescribed way of forcing collaboration.  Hopefully this new method will help develop ‘dynamic’ collaboration.  Rather than prescribe a set of centrallised APIs, allow the community (of users/companies/officials) to help use their skills to develop methods over time.

One of the things that the document also touched on, but to a lesser extent as the ‘freedom’ of data. It recommends the use of ODF as a format for storing government data.  As a member of the OpenDocument Fellowship (albeit a very hands-off member) - I fully support the benefits of storing data in an ‘open format’ and no in a format which require reverse engineering for access - no matter how well the format has been reverse engineered.

Matt Asay recently wrote about the importance of Freedom of Information after the recent debacle regarding the change to Facebook’s Terms of Service.  The thing that was most shocking about that episode was not the TOS themselves, but the apathy of the majority of users.  General End Users won’t get pent up and passionate about freedom of data - it’s a geeky topic.  However, like research into lower emissions, government should protect its citizens from the potential threat of closed data.

At the end of the day, it’s a great announcement by the government in terms of increasing transparency in governement.  However, the point is moot if the current government continue to approve acts such as the one mentioned only a couple of days ago, preventing citizens taking photos of their army and police force.  As Francis Bacon so elaborately put it:

He that gives good advice, builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both; but he that gives good admonition and bad example, builds with one hand and pulls down with the other.

I don’t admonish Tom Baker MP for his efforts regarding this policy document, however, there is a bigger question to be asked regarding recent events.  Hopefully I shall be proved wrong, and the independent counter terrorism review shall soon restore the level of freedom that my parents enjoyed.