If you ignore it, it might go away

Ten days ago or so, a ‘sliding-door’ moment happened.

 If, say, the police shooting of a man who, it would appear, did not fire first, albeit one that was armed, had happened this Saturday rather than the fortnight before, things may have turned out differently. Would the large scale riots have occurred in the pouring rain, for example?

However, ‘what-if’ moments are all well and good for reflection in the long-term future. You can speculate on what would have happened if JFK hadn’t been assassinated all you like as the permutations have pretty much run their cause. But, in the here and now, it’s time to focus on the fall-out and something that has been bugging me in the (generic, catch-all term alert) media’s reaction to it all.

Reference some events that have happened over the last fortnight or so. Firstly, a clear example of the Executive butting its nose into the business of the Judiciary by stating its desire for tough sentencing on rioters (rightly or wrongly) which has duly occurred in a great number of cases.

On to civil liberties with David Cameron Tory MP raising the possibility of shutting down Twitter and/or Facebook when riots break out to stop people using the social networking site to orchestrate and organise disturbances. Furthermore, Tory MP Louise Mensch suggesting rather than the public being told that Twitter is down, the message would be that it is under ‘maintenance’.

Finally, Cameron has also put forward a proposal to evict families from their council homes and withhold their benefits of the families of rioters. This is draconian, unfair and effective double jeopardy as it punishes those who may not have been involved in the rioting and only leads to exacerbating the problem of poverty which, it is this blogger's view, was a leading cause of the problem in the first place.

Now, I’m not one to throw about the term “totalitarianism” for two reasons. One; it will never happen in this country as even in a state as passive politically as ours, the people will not stand for large scale repealing of their civil liberties and secondly it’s an insult to use the term when there are genuine, frightening regimes out there that do fit the totalitarian model of rule and it is ignorant to make a comparison between the two.

But on the other side of the scale, the good folk at the Daily Mail and other papers on the ‘Right’ are often the first to jump on a story with the tiniest shred of liberty-crushing potential and impose the woefully GCSE-esque “Orwell’s 1984 was a warning, not a blueprint” comparison.

This past fortnight, I make that examples of breaking the boundaries of checks and balances between the Executive and the Judiciary, suggested curtailing of civil liberties such as the freedom of speech, suggested deliberate lying to your electorate and denying citizens the elements of the welfare state to which they are entitled to.

These policies are most probably, as the New York Times points out, most likely a reaction to try to garner public support in the wake of the rioting but it smacks of double standards for the right-wing press to complain about how CCTV cameras are infringing people’s rights but these policies are not.

Let's not even get started how investigating the causes of the riots (not even a proper Inquiry?! Come off it) has been swept under the carpet by focussing on the punishments and re-establishing 'order'.