Spooky Britain

Peter Hitchens writes:

It is still just possible to imagine that this is a normal country, if you don't pay too much attention.

But the story of the couple who were spied on in case they were cheating to get their child into a popular school shows just how strange and alien Britain has become.

Usually when I say I feel I am living in a foreign land, my enemies accuse me of making some veiled remark about immigration. But that's not what I mean at all.

Immigration is a problem, sure enough, but if I want to talk about it, I'll make it clear that's what I'm doing. I'm not ashamed of being against mass immigration on its current absurd scale.

I feel no need to disguise my views.

What bothers me just as much is the sense of being transported, when I wasn't looking, into a very bad dream from which there is no waking up.

When exactly did it happen? When did my town hall change from being a friendly, efficient place into a headquarters of fussy political correctness where I feel like an unwanted interloper?

When did the BBC news become a shameless propaganda show, instead of a discreet one?

When did my GP surgery start asking me for my ethnic origin? Worse, when did they start treating parents as guilty suspects if they bring a child into hospital after a fall?

When did it become impossible ever to speak to anyone who will take responsibility for anything?

When did I start getting the feeling, as one of these episodes begins, that there is absolutely no point in complaining or resisting, because if I don't accept this, sooner or later, 'security' is going to be called and I will be worse off than I was before.

It was not always like this. I know it wasn't. I can remember when it wasn't. What I cannot remember is, at any stage, asking for the changes that have happened, or being asked if I wanted them.

They just happened, and now they're here.

And, while there will be some outrage in the newspapers about the spying episode – since newspapers are one of the last places where common sense survives – nothing will change.

Other couples will be spied on in the same way, under the same law, which will not be changed.

So let us look at this case and see why it happened. First of all, the spying. Authority is immensely powerful in this country now.

It has hidden itself in a tangle of quangos and interlocking authorities, effectively nationalised and often Europeanised, too, run by people whose names we can never find out.

There's no scrutiny. The main political parties are dead things, job creation schemes for people who couldn't make it anywhere else, where independence is punished.

The law is beyond the reach of most of us, unless we want to use ambulance-chasing lawyers to make grotesque claims for damages.

Then there's the question of the school. Everyone knows that the official propaganda about education is a lie. We do not have a comprehensive school system, as we pretend, but a viciously unequal selective system which fails hundreds of thousands of children from the beginning.

Selection is done by money and influence. And people try to cheat, by singing hymns and saying prayers they don't believe, by renting flats in catchment areas or lying about their circumstances.

Replacing this with a just system based on merit is ruled to be 'politically impossible' and 'cruel' – so the unfairness has to be maintained, and policed by snooping.
This has happened for years. I know of head teachers who have done it personally.

If only they'd realised that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act allowed them to use taxpayers' money to stake out people's homes and follow them about.

So there it is. Lies, unaccountable authority and the seeds of a secret police force – checking today on school catchment areas, and tomorrow on what? One thing's for sure. You'll find out too late.