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...I'm going to take a shot at it. I see Tia MacGregor, one of the pair of new Tory councillors on Oxford City Council has been a media-whoring, trying to get another opportunity in the local rag to justify the unjustifiable. I notice in her latest self-defense New Tory Councillor Defends Her Move (from thisisoxfordshire) she no longer mentions her earlier suggestion that she was seduced by Tory policy on the NHS.

Could it be that they do not actually have any policy on the NHS yet? For it seems it must be up in the air in one of those interminable policy review groups, for her new colleagues in Cornerstone are trying to influence the outcome...

I wonder if Dr MacGregor agrees with their approach:

Tory right-wingers step up pressure on Cameron over NHS

By Colin Brown

The group, which is led by senior Tory backbencher Edward Leigh and has the support of a number of front bench spokesmen, said in a report that scrapping the NHS as a tax-based system could enable the Tories to offer "massive" tax cuts at the next election.

This is the party you have joined, Tia. How are you going to look your patients and voters in the face and explain this to them?

The Home Affairs Select Committee has apparently published a report suggesting that we may be wandering unaware into a Surveillance State. Just where have these people been for the last decade and more?

When I was on Oxford City Council we used to receive applications for new CCTV cameras and we were often cautious about permitting them. To be fair to the Greens on the council at the time it was usually they who made most noise about the civil liberties connotations (maybe they were on the wrong side of the "If you have nothing to hide" argument!).

I also tried to have put into the council's constitution a condition to make any surveillance under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (the one that the newspapers are now braying that councils are using to snoop on dogs shitting not terrorist catching - for which it was never explicitly intended) subject to scrutiny and approval of elected councillors and not just officers, at whatever level.

Around the time the News of the Screws started campaigning for "Sarah's Law" in 2000 already there were academics implanting their daughters with chips to find out where they were all the time and already there were people, including me, questioning this as an invention that ought to be lost because of the implcations for civil liberties.

It is not just astonishing, but a dereliction of their duties in my opinion, that those who purport to represent and lead us at the highest level of government to have taken till summer of 2008 to come up with a similar suggestion, that we are sleepwalking into an all pervasive surveillance state. Absolutely amazing.

This need not be a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted though. Much of the technology is, at least superficially, comforting, with its claims to be able to prevent crime or find our loved ones in trouble, and much of it has benign application as well as potential for abuse. More importantly it's not a good reason to get all neo-Luddite about technology.

Surveillance can and is used to protect public safety for instance that need not be able to identify individuals at all. You can monitor the flow of crowds, such as might have prevented the Hillborough disaster, through thermal imaging (indeed it's easier for a computer to pick up just body temperature hotspots in order to be able to enforce, say, a safe numerical capacity in a building or trace someone missing in an emergency, than it is for them to pick up visible light images with less contrast in the image).

Databases can and are used to enhance our experience of all sorts of services without being linked to any super database providing nefarious users access to all data anyone holds on a person. And modern communications can and are used to ensure timely delivery of information that will help us, even save our lives, without needing to be centralized.

Even tracking systems can and are used to help us find our way around, or even to help others find us if we are in trouble, without actually tracking our every move when we don't need them.

So why is it that when this technology is touched by the heavy hand of government it nearly always seems that it is being used against us?

Well first of course, Lord Acton's dictum applies. And information is power. Those who seek power over us, seek information by which to maintain that power. Because even with the best will in the world, they think they know best, and what's best of all is if they manage to stick around to implement it. There can be no other explanation for o'erleaping political ambition.

Second, they are easily corruptible in this search for power, whether it be over individuals or power over whole markets and systems - which "progressives" at least seem to feel they require in order to enable their interventionist policies of "robbery" and "redistribution". With nearly half of the nation's income to spend, government is a huge target for someone to sell their "stuff". If some of the comments about it are true, the Lib Dems, with their latest road pricing policy, on which more in another post , have fallen victim to this. Companies who invest in technology want to make money out of that technology. If they can use it to land a great big fat government contract they have hit the jackpot.

Third, I always reckon that the people who "integrate" the individual technologies of others, mostly morally neutral and benign, don't much care about the outcomes beyond their own "problem domain". They too are after making a bit of money by finding innovative ways of putting others' work to use. And that means being "first to market" with the ideas. Corners are cut. In the process of producing something useful first to get that sale, they don't have to think too much about consequences outside of their own field. They are only selling a database system. It's the uses it is put to or what it is mixed with, out of their control, that can make it intrusive or benign, and that is for the future to boot.

Now don't get me wrong. I am an optimist about most modern technology. Because of modern communications methods and the sharing of certain data, I do believe we are entering an epoch in which discovery of all sorts will be speeded up. Cures for diseases will be discovered in double time. Technology that will enable the poorest third of the world at last to access some of the benefits of the past couple of hundred years, or education, health care, industry and the growth of material wealth, even to ensure they have enough to eat. That our ability to communicate, and trade with, individuals and enterprises right around the planet has the ability to spread wealth and peace more widely than ever before. That it is about to unleash a truly "giant leap for mankind".

But that threatens government. It threatens those who, having attained power, need to justify their own existence, and expense accounts. But the good news is that the market, the producers and integrators of those technologies still have to make money. So they continue developing, and this is where our influence can come in. Our pressure, our reaction to their previous attempts, can shape the factors that will go into their next research. At some point, perhaps when they understand that the technology has only made a minute difference, opinion will swing against the untrammelled benefits of CCTV and the manufacturers will look for ways of delivering the benefits without the snooping.

And it's up to those of us with half an interest in the technology, amateur or professional, to think for ourselves and propose possible solutions that resolve the problems we ourselves have with the systems currently on offer. Those whose job it is to scrutinise and hold government to account cannot be trusted to do so if it has taken them all this time to state what has been bloody obvious to anyone with all synapses firing.

Most of all, it is government itself that is the problem. To roll back the surveillance state, we need to roll back the state itself. Never before have governments had so much power over us. Yet they continually fail to make the differences they promise at election time. It's time we woke up to this and stopped listening to their spin, excuses and lies and stopped putting our trust in them.

I had the repeat of that "Great Global Warming Swindle" on in the background last night. I didn't really watch it last week when it was on, and I only caught bits of it again last night (I know - I should turn the thing off if I'm not really watching it!). But there was one bit in particular, towards the end, with which I agreed, and whicih has been a bee in my bonnet for a long time.

It was not about the science. It was about social and development policy towards the developing/undeveloped world. All too often, the point was made, the developing world is sitting on piles of natural wealth and energy sources we want to use. We happily take it from them, but then tell them they shouldn't be using those same resources because they'll destroy the planet, as if somehow we are not.

But assuming we accept that humanity is causing global warming (even as the scientists on that program seemed not to be), one of the biggest factors in that has been the rampant replication of that Gaia destroying super-virus, homo sapiens, over the past few decades in particular. Chris Huhne made the point at a talk of his I heard in October that the global population growth is a big part of the problem, and that economic development was a way to reduce it.

Yet "The Great Global Warming Swindle" sounded about right when it said that we seemed to be saying that because of the potential to increase global warming we didn't really actually want those billions of people to develop their way out of the economic strife that tends to make people recoil to the security of breeding lots of children. Or at least we are putting massive obstacles in the way of such development.

Which brings me to my idea...that we should put the Commonwealth, far more so than either Europe or transatlantic polity, at the core of our foreign and international development policy for the twenty-first century. Nearly sixty years ago, Churchill suggested that Britain's post-war role in the world ought to be as a link between Europe, America and the Commonwealth. We seem to have put a lot of emphasis on the former two, but for a variety of reasons seem to have quietly dropped the latter.

Yes, the intervening decades have seen many upheavals of independence from Empire and those newly "emancipated" nations struggling and jostling to find their position in the world. But let's face it, we are only where we are because of them. Because of the way we colonised them and took from them what we wanted, what would make us materially rich.

The Commonwealth could be a model, modern community of nations, with members from every continent and from every stratum of economic development on the planet, from the very richest to the very poorest, working together under a common aim of redistributing the common wealth within it to ensure that all its peoples attain their full potential.

And not only for ecological ends, but also for global security ends. Just as it appears that the underprivileged on urban sink estates are more likely to drift into criminality (I know, that sounds so patronisingly Victorian but I hope you get what I mean), so those whole nations and peoples that see the imbalances in the world's wealth, and, moreoever believe resentfully that they are poor because we are rich, and that we have taken our riches from them over decades and centuries, are potentially more likely to want easy ways, such as nuclear weapons, to punch above their weight in the world.

So, let's have at it - without it becoming another resented imperial venture, how can we put those nations to whom we owe so very much of our own successes at the heart of our economic development strategies and help them overleap the pains of industrialisation that could further jeopardise the planet and in the process give them the economic security they need to stop helter skelter population growth exacerbating the problems? Ironically, of course, if we heed the calls to reduce our carbon footprint, it is likely that we will set back the economic development of many of those same countries because we are no longer willing to buy our Kenyan vegetables and so on. Our reduction is such consumption has to be replaced with other ways for those countries to develop. Imagine the great wealth of the UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore, and the developing wealth of the likes of India and Malaysia, being brought to bear to address the abject poverty of the likes of Zimbabwe, Tanzania or Bangaladesh. We could create a beautiful common wealth together.

When Gordon Brown came to power last year he promised a "government of all the talents". A year or so on and with what, 45,000,000 adults to choose from (most of whom of course would not touch his government, probably any government, with a very long barge-pole), one has to wonder just what talents he had in mind to bring this motley crew together:

Come to think of it, there's probably not one talent between them. These three, and this choice by the "dear leader" to bring them into government, just highlights for me how hopeless the very idea of state government is. There is no way that these people are somehow uniquely capable, any more than anyone else in the country, to make the momentous decisions we stupidly cede to the state to take on our behalf.

I just noticed Nick on BBC being interviewed for his opinion on the latest data losses, saying something to the effect that it's part of a systematic incompetence of this government. Tribal type "they're bad" politics.

I'd much prefer him to say that this is evidence of a more general problem with government as an institution, that no political party would be able to control this particular beast and that we would be looking at ways not simply of being more secure about data but at ways of dismantling some of the bureaucracy that wants to keep such data in the first place. That "government has no business holding much of this data let alone carrying it around in laptops or posting it on disks".