Simon Jenkins: You’re better safe than free - the mantra of the Whitehall Taliban
Sunday, 21 October 2007, The Times
How much did you
drink last week? In Harrogate 26.4% of you had between 12 and 17
“large” glasses of wine (depending on your sex), in Mole Valley 25.5%
of you did, and in Leeds 25.3%. Don’t ask me how the government knows
this. It apparently wants to “target middle-class drinkers”. Public
money must be squandered, so why not measure the nation’s drinking
habits?
Meanwhile the makers of the film, The Bourne Ultimatum, needed a
location where a character could be watched by police as he moved step
by step about the city. Did they use Moscow or Berlin or New York? No,
they used London. They did so because Britain is the world capital of
surveillance, deploying a fifth of the global stock of closed-circuit
television cameras, even though the Home Office admitted last week that
they were next to useless.
Click here to read the rest
|
