One Nation Under CCTV – 1984 is here, The Stockholm Programme.

Description

Yep. A favourite and overused cry from lefties ever

since 1984 was published in 1949. I remember in 1984 (I

was 13 at the time) a Television Program discussing

whether 1984 was really like 1984 . The consensus was a

firm “No”. There was no mass surveillance at the time.

CCTV was in its infancy, cash was still king – so no

being tracked through your consumerism. Passports were

just bits of paper and leather with your photo in – no

barcode or chip. No mobile phones. Your personal details

were collected on random bits of paper, distributed

across a number of gunmetal-grey filing cabinets,

scattered across the country.

Clearly, unless you were a belonged to subversive

organisation like the NUM or CND you probably were not

being surveilled at the time by the security services,

half of whom seemed to have been Oxbridge-educated Soviet

agents anyway. The technology didn’ t exist for them to

casually observe you, well maybe you – but not all of

you– they had to “bug” you – physically putting a

listening device in your receiver (how quaint) or

actually follow you about, or sitting outside your house

in a British Telecom van, continuously smoking Embassy

No. 1′ s in skin tight jeans with some headphones on over

their permed hair. Or at least that’ s how it was done in

the 1980′ s Thames Television program “The Professionals”.