Police State Britain: further confirmation

It's happened again. Bringing the news that 157,000 people were stopped and searched at random last year in London down to earth, there's a documented example of a cop trying to relieve a freelance photographer of his work equipment.

The question has to be posed: are Britain's police now completely out of control?

What makes it worse is that it's anti-terrorist legislation, which of course we were all assured would only be used on people 'suspected of terrorism'. This totally misses the point. Give people too much of a resource - power, money, anything - and their first priority becomes to make as much use of it as possible, not use it in judicious minima. Like any increase in power, it's been adopted enthusiastically by the people most advantaged by it. This isn't anything to do with cops; it's just human nature.

Britain's police state would like to keep everyone's DNA on a database. (It already has that of everyone arrested, including those never charged with any offence.) It runs 500,000 CCTV cameras in London alone and records millions of faces a day. It wants to track your car on every journey and already tracks your journeys using Oyster. It records the details of every phone call made, every email sent, and every website visited. Make no mistake: the UK is now a police state, and has been for several years, despite their lack of guns. (And even that's changing; a large number of squad cars now pack heat in the boot.)

Under Blair and now Brown, thousand-year-old legal traditions enshrined in the Magna Carta have been quietly eroded to the point of irrelevance. Guilty until proven innocent, stopping and searching without due cause, intimidating and timewasting are now everyday police tactics. It's not even down to the cops themselves; in large part it's driven by this government's obsession with numbers and targets. If a policeman's promotion depends on making one more arrest today, what else is he going to do but stop the next person who looks like he won't complain too much?

What makes all this rather sad is that as a white middle-class male in gainful employment, I should be the Met's strongest supporter. Instead, I have deep suspicions about their commitment to actually keeping bad people off the streets; it just seems they get their kicks these days from hassling people and screeching down streets at 100kmh. If in a bad situation, calling the cops is probably the last thing I'd do. Which should be - but isn't - a huge, red, waving flag for Britain's police commissioners.

Graduation day

I know it's really for the 22-year-olds and the parents, but I found my MBA graduation at Warwick strangely enjoyable. (That's me on stage in the pic, anonymity preserved by my parents' fumbling with their new digital camera.)

In a way, this means more at Warwick than it does at ancient Cambridge or Oxford; as a new institution, built during Britain's last wave of red-brick university rollouts in the 1960s, Warwick doesn't have a legacy of a thousand years to call on. It's had to drag itself up from 1960s shitabrick mediocrity, elbow its way into league tables and RAE scores, hold up a magnet to top academics by dint of marketing, results, and sheer hard work. I'm proud to get my MBA from this place, even if the PhDs have cooler hats.

And so 18 months of work is closed. But the next three years - where I'll still be involved with WBS - have only just started.

A screeching cacophony

In contrast to the earthy principles and simple rhythms of Obama's speech, the inauguration poem is one of the worst pieces of jangling incompetence ever wrung from the English language.

I mean, what is that? Is it a four-yearly event, the same thing read out each time, or is it specially composed for each inauguration?

I mean, it shows some early promise, with some nice assonance in that 'noise and bramble', but rapidly goes downhill. It's not a piece of poetry; it's a grab-bag of doggerel as heard from a wild-eyed vagrant gazing through the railings at Speaker's Corner. No much structure to it; no rising theme, just a near-random drunken walk through odd sentence fragments the author (I'd hesitate to say 'poet') thought might be interesting to say.

Whenever it was written and whoever wrote it, no hard work went into it, at all. At least inaugural speechwriters know they haven't got much to beat.

President O

Well done Obama! That was really quite a good speech.

There's probably no driver

The story of the religionista who refuses to drive a bus promoting rationality would be funny if it wasn't for the bus company's reaction.

So First Bus says it will do 'everything in its power' to make sure the god theorist doesn't have to drive the buses with the slogans on? What a letdown. It's yet another symptom of a growing British malaise: a tendency to try and cater for prissy people's whimsies, regardless of the cost to everyone else.

OK, so the driver believes in one of the 250,000 god theories. That's fine with me; it's a perfectly understandable evolved trait. But what he's saying by his actions is... "My private beliefs are important to me... and they should be important to you too!" Well, they're not.

But my right to believe otherwise (adopting a rational view) apparently isn't all right with him. He believes he should have the right to pick and choose the advertising that appears at his workplace, which is paid for by someone else and is none of his damn business.

First Bus is making a big mistake. The correct response is such situations is "Suck it in - or find another job." Once again, by pussyfooting around religionistas, we're empowering the silliest ones and making them think they're important.

Should a gay male driver be able to pick the buses without lingerie models? Or a black driver be able to limit his vehicle choice to those which promote black role models? Or a Muslim be able to take himself off the roster for a bus on the route to the local synagogue?

You can see we're on a very slippery slope here, and First Bus is driving us headlong down it. It's time to push that 'STOPPING' button.

Britain's Conservatives: the rotund choice

So Ken Clarke and Eric Pickles have joined David Cameron's Shadow Cabinet. What's he trying to do - make the Tories the party of FAT people?

I suppose it makes sense. With obesity an increasingly weighty problem in the UK, fatties are an important voting bloc, and of course they're hugely over-represented in the demographic Cameron needs to reach most - the feckless poor. It's a good strategy. Win the fatties, and you win the election.

David Cameron is reaching out to the big hitters, with a couple of heavyweight political appointments. Let's hope his arms are long enough to go round them.

Echo WHAT to Charlie WHO?

I can't believe what I'm hearing. A regular blue-jacketed Tube worker at Victoria Station, radio'ing a colleague: "Echo Bravo to Charlie Tango..."

WHAT?

The guy wasn't police, or even security. He was just a train station worker in a blue vest with the roundel logo, probably in charge of classifying litter by size or something. Yet like so many quangoes and pseudo-authorities in the Blair/Brown surveillance state, he claimed the false authority of codewords and jargon.

What's wrong with "Oi, Fred, are you there?"

Why on earth would minor officials of a local transport system be using language specifically designed to exclude and elevate? Of course, the answer's obvious: I just don't want to accept it.

I mean, it's a great organisational behavioural strategy for any police state - witness the cop-style uniforms adopted by the RSPCA and Community Relations Officers (the first is an animal charity, the second assistants to cops with no powers of arrest, but both put on airs of authority and give you that we-know-where-you-live look.)

But if you look at any developing police state, this is one of the things they do first: create an 'officer class' of little people empowered to sneer at you and make your life very, very difficult if you offend them.

Echo Bravo to Charlie Tango - this is how freedom dies. In a cloud of codewords spoken behind your back, just loud enough for you to hear.

Packing out the calendar

Hmmmm... my calendar for the week is looking amazingly full. Somehow, when I see a nice busy schedule I just feel contented: it confirms I'm self-actuated, developing as an individual, and above all doing something with my life. Nicholas Bate would be proud. (Even if some of the things on it are a bit self-centred. But 2009 is all about Me.)

The Evening That Time Dragged On

Unbelievably awful. Poorly paced, badly characterised, and - unforgivably for an effects-driven action film - stupifyingly dull.

I speak, of course, of the remake of 'The Day the Earth Stood Still'.

I'd heard bad things about it, but it was on at IMAX, and I love that Waterloo experience: watching a film on a screen so big you have to keep turning your head from side to side. My rationalise was that an effects-driven movie would be okay on an IMAX screen, no matter how bad the film. But I was wrong. The only bad thing this film didn't have was a paper-over-the-cracks voiceover narrative.

Which is something of a shame, because the basic updated premise is quite good. The original was about an alien deciding whether the dangerously warlike humans deserved a chance to survive; in the 21st century this becomes an alien deciding whether the dangerously non-green humans deserve a chance to put the damage they've done to the planet right. Which is a reasonable script driver for an updated version.

First off, there wasn't even a vague homage to the classic 50s original. The fact that the initial bullet loosed off by a nervous sentry WAS in fact killing Klaatu; the way a woman saved the world with the line 'Gort, Klaatu barada nikto' without knowing what it meant; the way the saucer was seen innocently by children (in the remake, the kid's a selfish, violent, Bush-like neoconservative-leaning little bastard) - all just wrong, wrong, wrong.

And the effects - swirling globes, okay, but that's one of just two major SFX in the whole film, and the other one (little metal insects that devour manmade objects) is just bizzarre.

Now the characters. Jennifer Connelly is weak; nobody'd rely on HER to save the world. The little kid is a completely unsympathetic character that I wanted to boot in the ass the whole movie. The only good bit of casting is Keanu, his trademark blank stare not changing throughout.

The best actor in the film is a metal robot who does next to nothing.

[SPOILER AHEAD, as if I could SPOIL it more] And the script - who the hell wrote that? There's no tie-up, no ending as such, just events rolling to the credits. You get the impression that whatever Jennifer achieved by persuading Keanu to head for home, it wouldn't change the human race's attitude towards its planet (which was the whole point.) There should have been a big landmark scene of Keanu finally being able to address the UN, of political leaders realising and actually agreeing to DO SOMETHING. Characters kept saying Earth was 'on the brink', but nobody seemed willing to actually do anything about it. As filmed, Keanu's big farewell just wasn't a supportable event and should have died in the editing room.

Bad, bad, bad. Keanu, klaatu barada nikto!

Width of a page

One thing I like about my 1920x1200 resolution laptop is that I can fit three A4 pages across the screen.

It's a gas

So Russia's cut off Ukraine's gas. Two things come to light here.

First, how a reasonable marketing disagreement can get out of hand (with the wronged party portrayed as the bully.) Second, just how fragile Europe's energy infrastructure is: with only a few weeks of gas in reserve, Russia could game much of Europe on the spot market with barely an effort.

Russia's being painted as the bad guy playing fast and loose with a smaller neighbour. Whereas in reality, it's probably more like the situation between England and Scotland - the smaller country is being ungrateful for the multiple concessions it receives and the older brother's finally had enough. (Scotland spends far more in tax than it receives from its own citizens; the difference is made up by English taxpayers. Yet with a political class defined by common hatred of the English, there's no realisation that their economy is being supported by their benevolent southern neighbour.)

Ukraine receives cut-price gas from Russia, a remnant of the old Soviet Union where satellite states could buy energy at a discount. Russia, not unreasonably (although in a somewhat bellicose way) wants to move Ukraine closer to market prices, and Ukraine doesn't like it.

And because of all this, Europe's been on the brink of an energy crisis for years without doing much about it. For all the population density and energy needs of this crowded continent, the lifelines that bring in burnables are few and narrow: some North Sea platforms, a few wind farms dotted about, some hamsters pedalling a wheel in Brighton. (OK, I was joking about the hamsters.) The bulk of Europe's energy flows along fewer than a dozen pipes, none more than a metre in radius, all of them going through some rather dodgy geography. If there was ever a reason to roof your house in solar panels, this is it.

I have never quite got the idea of marching bands

Apparently the London New Year's Day Parade has now been going 23 years, which means it may not be - as I'd always assumed - a Ken Livingstonism, creation of a man addicted to spectacle and in control of too much taxpayer's money. (When he was Mayor, the local term for City Hall's occasional newsheet was 'The Daily Ken', since it concentrated so heavily on informing us precisely how wonderful Mr Livingstone was.)

But even if it's not the brainchild of some despotic leftie, I must admit I don't get the point of it.

I'm sure it'll be a reasonably potent opiate for the masses, like the X Factor or EastEnders. I admit such distractions for the proletariat are necessary: look at what the chav classes get up to if they're not entertained. (With bread and circuses you can control your city; we haven't really come that far since ancient Rome.)

But - why is a London event about 90% American marching bands? I mean, shouldn't the London New Year's day Parade be about... London? Marching bands in general just don't do it for me; if you march, you're aiming to get somewhere. Why do it in a big circuit that takes you back where you started? For me, the only purpose of marching bands is that it gave us Alyson Hannigan in gym shorts.

Bah, humbug.