The Guardian notes this morning that:
A national police unit that uses undercover officers to spy on political groups is currently monitoring almost 9,000 people it has deemed "domestic extremists".
I couldn't help but wonder if writing this blog counts as political extremism.
If so, how?
Is it extreme to ask people to pay their tax in the right place, at the right rate and at the right time? I suspect it is. But if true it would show how absurd such monitoring was.
And, of course, the Met may have no interest in me at all.
But that's the problem, isn't it? Not knowing is what makes so much of this activity so deeply pernicious and contrary to any concept of society.
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After I read the article I sat thinking the same, Richard. I used to have some insight into these things having spent a number of years teaching security management to post grad students from various branches of the police, military, inteligence and private security sectors while at the University of Leicester. Though not applying to all the students I came across a fair number certainly took the view that any views and actions that weren’t solidly conservative – both politically and socially – were by definition extreme. How that fed through into the work they did I cannot say.
But the major point you make is the most important. The ordinary citizens of the UK (and US and pretty much any other country, it would seem) have no way of knowing what’s extremist or not. Or what makes one a ‘person of interest’. So we might hypothesise that at the regular meetings of Cameron’s high net worth policy chat group (or whatever it’s called – the one that the Google CEO and his ilk attend), your name comes up as someone whose nmaking life difficult. Or perhaps senior people at HMRC mention this blog and the way you are always stirring up stuff. Who knows whether that might be sufficient for a quiet word – or maybe just a nod and wink – to the right people.
And then there’s your Tax Justice related network. Does it follow that if you’re a person of interest then they are too? No doubt Nick Shaxson is in his own right, having upset the powers that be in Jersey, but I’m assuming we’d include Richard Brooks. And what about the HMRC whistleblower? And so it goes on. And if people think that far fetched then they need to read up on some of the stuff that’s been in the public domain (though not widely publicised) in the US for years.
Ultimately though, one of the most damaging things about all of the revelations of recent weeks is that they further erode trust in government and the state (which won’t suprise anyone of US extraction, of course). Add that to the existing levels of mistrust and distrust of politicians and the legitimacy of the system is seriously at question. However, with very few politicians courageous enough to challenge this, and with the large corporation and the rich being the main beneficiaries, I see little prospect of anything other than a continuing drift into the 21st century equivalent of the “Stasi state”. Perhaps this explains why relations between the UK and Russia have improved so much recently.
Depressingly true, I fear
On a similar note, Richard, this was buried away in The Guardian, but worth a read as it gives a non Anglo Saxon perspective.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/25/nsa-gchq-spy-germans
Is it extreme to ask people to pay their tax in the right place, at the right rate and at the right time?
This is called obeying the law. Ordinary people are expected to abide by that.
Ordinary people like my wife are expected to submit tax returns to HMRC by 31 January each year. It actually costs her about 100 times more to do this than her current tax owed – believe it or not, HMRC are holding an owed tax figure of nine pence over from year to year against her. They can’t chase her, and she can’t make a payment of that size, but they won’t write it off. But that’s the law, and we abide by it.
How can it be wrong to require that everybody else abides by the rules too?
I doubt you would show up on the 9,000 most dangerous people in the UK…
That’s nice to know
But I’ll tell you that this blog is scoured by the Treasury, often
Its a shame, they appear to have been wasting their time. They don’t seem to have picked up on a few of your good ideas and used them as policy
Guess who just got a real terms budget increase to do more of this stuff? GCHQ, MI5, MI6, etc! You Couldn’t Make It Up.