As a country, we've lost faith in politics and I fully expect this to be demonstrated by a very low turnout for the general election in June. The issue with this is we currently have no strong enough opposition to the Tories (thanks to an incredibly effective smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, led by the media and perpetuated by the Labour MPs themselves) so will end up with an even greater Conservative majority and another 5 years of this dystopian madness. I very much hope I'm proven wrong.
I'd be happy to elaborate on some of these points if you're interested; I have a few theories about what is currently going on and what has led us here. It is both very interesting and incredibly upsetting to observe and analyse the state of politics in this country at the moment.
Edit: I should state that I am not a Labour party supporter, I was just trying to give a vague overview of the state of our politics at the moment.
Im sure Americans just experienced Deja vu. Sure, they are "all the same" in some narrow way. This equivalence should only matter to single-issue voters.
Whether it's Labour or the Conservatives in power, it seems inevitable that they will push these dangerous ideas in the name of 'keeping us safe from terrorists and paedophiles'.
The trouble is, if there's a toxic authoritarian culture in the higher levels of the civil service, there's really no way of ousting it. "Whoever you elect, the government gets in".
Perhaps the very name of the office. "Home" is a word with a lot of powerful emotional resonance.
UK: anyone got a good simple page I can point neighbours at about why this should be an election issue?
> As a person from and living in the UK, I'm equally shocked and appalled as you. Everybody I know is baffled by and vehemently against these ridiculous proposals. Quite frankly I have no idea who is voting for the Conservatives
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14374899
It is important for anyone who does not wish to be continue to be blindsided by what "appears" to be surprising to be aware of and correct their own biases.
The trends in UK policymaking (namely, the fact that they're continuing rather than having been ousted) suggests a pattern, and while comments like the above feed into the denial I cite in that comment [0], objective observations (one way or another) serve to clear the air - but only when they're objective. Comments like these - that're "I'm just as confused as you are" - just end up setting discussion back, as people end up being misinformed (as I feel I have been from them in the past, and continue to be unless I make a conscious effort to consider what by all accounts seems the more likely alternative). Hard census-like data would be better than anecdota for this reason, for instance.
Perhaps as you say your anecdotal evidence supports "Everybody [you] know" being 'baffled', but as you're chiming in as a UK citizen, please be aware of any other potential selection or location biases. You're in a better position than outsiders to gauge and figure out where your blind spots are, and it's seeming more to me that the news doesn't bear out the easy-to-jump-to-conclusion (especially in the net-biased echo chamber) of your countrymen at large sharing the same view.
For the above reasons I contend that these are biases, merely observations. I observe everybody around me supporting significantly more libertarian ideals and so I wonder who and where are these other people who hold opposing ideals. I'm sure I could find out the answer from census and statistical data but that doesn't bring me any closer to understanding the reasons why these people vote as they do. Part of my theory is that these opposing ideals are not ideals at all and are in fact a reflection of the efficacy of the marketing campaigns of right-wing politics.
For GB's sake I hope some minority subdicision forms and at least manages to secure some of the crucial points of privacy or otherwise figure out how they can coexist with their system or one more suited to them... shrug The scarier aspect of globalization.
I live in the USA and would feel this way too about Trump if I didn't know people who lived in the interior. I live in the Los Angeles metro, which is one of America's "alpha cities."
London and other major global cities have formed something almost akin to the science fiction concept of a breakaway civilization. They are their own global meta-nation. Meanwhile the interior and rural districts of their own host countries have been in a state of permanent depression for almost two decades now.
Not saying the conservatives or Trump will fix this. They're political opportunists riding a wave of dissent. All Trump had to do to get elected was to style himself the opposite of all the values and ideas popular in global Urbanity. One of the most insightful comments about Trump I've read was that his racism was more intended to offend educated white urban coastal liberals than to offend non-white races.
From what I can see Brexit and this stuff is the same.
It's a "fuck you" vote from the forgotten districts.
Edit: required reading:
Urban vs rural values and opinions are almost mirror images of each other...
In regard to Brexit, there's actually a strong libertarian case for leaving the EU. I personally think it was shortsighted of people (and somewhat reckless) to vote with this mindset given our current government, as the exit of the EU that is desired by those libertarians is not that which will occur. However, this is a much more contentious opinion amongst people I know, many of whom would argue that this was a valid and commendable rejection of the status quo. Saying this, I don't know if the libertarian argument for Brexit was strongly enough represented in the referendum to tip the balance. Given the tiny margin by which Leave won[2] (< 1.3 million votes. It's worth noting that this majority corresponds to about 1/3 of the electorate), I think it's possible.
I think you meant 1/30?
Almost, except that cities are utterly dependent on "the interior and rural districts" for food.
Honestly, I don't understand the fantasy world people like you live in. You seem to assume that people who live in cities are helpless kittens or something.
Well, those (liberty and freedom) are mostly cherished in lip service by most, and only when it comes to government.
Otherwise, few bat an eye that between them Google and Facebook (and perhaps 2-3 other players) control and have access to 90% of what people do on the internet. And that they also sleep with their government for their nation's interests.
Big difference there between the one government that can put you in jail and you cannot divorce without leaving the country (sometimes not even then), and some fragmented web services you can point your browser in a different place.
Enormous, meaningful difference worth fighting over.
I agree with GPP that the 2 aren't really comparable.
Between Google Ads on tons of site, their Google Analytics in tons of sites, your friends sharing stuff, photos etc with you on Facebook, your friends receiving your messages on their Gmail account, and the several other (differently branded) services they own, not to mention sites hosted by them on GAE and such, sites serving you Google Web Fonts, etc, you don't really have much choice...
Especially with Google being the only game in town for quality search results.
By all means though, let's regulate the internet giants to make it even easier. But I don't subscribe to the opinion that the battle is already lost, or that these moderately powerful companies have the same potential effect on our lives as our government.
The Trump administration has really shown that this cynical view is not true. Whether you like or dislike Trump, you can't deny that the kind of stuff people say about him freely, the level of protesting in major cities (three major ones since the inauguration alone--it's not something you see in a repressive society.
And in this case, most major players of the establishment are, if not entirely totally anti-Trump, at least anti-Trump until they whip him into submission (e.g. to conventional Republican agendas and ways to go about them).
Try being an investigative journalist like Webb, an activist (even a tame one like MLK) or a whistleblower for some big corp, or making waves that disrupt the major lobbies, or Washington politics, and see what happens...
I guess we are all secretly OK with it. "You shouldn't worry, unless you have something to hide."
If the more fascist members of society are placated by technical placebos, why not allow them to pretend they are actually in control of the "situation"?
I'm personally keeping a close eye on lifi. In the US the FCC restrictions on the range of wifi networks restricts mesh networking substantially. If it's just invisible gigabit light communication from rooftop to rooftop, it could be a huge gamechanger.
The right to encrypt and the right to privacy too are precedents that need to be defended, otherwise as soon as the law catches up and learns about the loophole, it will be closed quickly.
CCTV and internet control are additional tools for them.
Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the Wikipedia list of people killed by the police in the UK since the year 2000 fits on 1 screen on my (admittedly large) monitor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
There's a few big exceptions: policing in Northern Ireland was so sectarian it had to be rebuilt. The Met (London) police have a bit of a race relations problem, although again nowhere near as bad as most large US cities.
And the police have a record of tracking and interfering with peaceful left-wing political groups to a disproportionate extent. There's cases outstanding relating to undercover officers who had relationships with women they were spying on.
No. Ordinary police officers that you might meet day to day are mostly just decent people who want to be approachable and have good relations with their local communities. The collective organisations that represent those officers within senior management and to the wider government often defend these principles. Policing by consent remains the foundation of our system, at least for now.
I fear this will change over time, though, not because of the generally decent people working on the front lines in policing, but because of the authoritarian measures pushed through by their government masters and the bias in how they are used, the perception that if something does go seriously wrong then the police involved will not be held accountable, and probably also some element of having a lot of US TV shows and films where we see a theatrical portrayal of a very different kind of relationship.
Yes, most people are OK with it. Hackers' response to this datum tends to be 'well they shouldn't be because liberty and reasons,' but what hackers are missing is that most people are not logical an also there are far more of them than you so it's important to get to people where they are rather than where you would like them to be.
It's the same thing when people get upset about the NSA or other spy agencies. I have been pointing out for years now that such agencies perform an important task of government (because no government, organization or nation prospers by being less informed or allowing others to gain an information asymmetry over it). Instead of acknowledging this social reality and developing strategies that incorporate, people demand absurd quixotic solutions that ignore everything we know about economics and human behavior.
The sad reality is that most people (~80%) are passive and just go along with whatever they're told to. There's a small sadistic fringe at one end of the political spectrum that responds to all problems by blaming them on the weakest people they can find as scapegoats, and a small idealistic fringe at the other that clings to a nive idealism; both fringes are capable of totalitarianism.
People in hacker culture decry this state of affairs, but most of them don't want to give up their cushy jobs or privileges or take any risks, and so they get co-opted into building the next iteration of oppressive technology by default.
The more chilling question is why is a Western democracy trying to copy the frameworks of China, the UAE, and other crumbling regimes? This feels like a shadow of the Cold War where certain people believed that the US would fail because capitalism was weaker than communism (parallels abound.)
Sadly this is unlikely to become a key issue in the forthcoming election, so an attempt at implementation is likely and we'll end up 'supporting' it passively by voting for the proposers.
After living quietly with 24/7 cctv monitoring, all kinds of anti-privacy laws, etc, it's not like it's a real nail-biting mystery this one...
Firstly, a lot of people know little if anything about what's going on. They're quite understandably more concerned about high profile issues like Brexit and the collapsing NHS and trains that don't run so they can't get to work and the cost of their kid going to university. The mainstream media is also more concerned with those things.
Secondly, even those who do have some idea of what's going on overall support authoritarian measures if those measures are presented as providing necessary tools to the police and security services to combat serious crime and terrorism, and of course they always are presented that way. When normal people are asked about the actual measures in the laws, for example about all the different government organisations that now have powers to access surveillance data and all the different purposes they can use it for, a lot of people do have significant reservations or even object strongly. But we still tend to trust our government organisations to basically do the right thing in this country, for better or worse, and so supporting the police and security services with new powers is a vote-winner.
The Conservatives are the only mainstream party promising to follow through with Brexit, and Labour have disintegrated under the 'leadership' of Jeremy Corbyn. This means that many traditional Labour voters are willing to vote Conservative to ensure they get their Brexit, regardless of whatever else the Tories are putting forwards in their manifesto. They've can basically put whatever they want in their manifesto and people will still vote for them to ensure Brexit happens - that's how determined the Leave voters are.
Current polls (although we know how reliable those are) suggest the Tories will take over 400 seats at the general election, giving them absolute control of the government with no other party able to oppose them.
The biggest problem now is not that Labour has disintegrated, though the infighting certainly have not made things easy, but that UKIP and the Lib Dems have been disintegrating, and UKIP voters in particular appears to be largely going Tory.
Labour might lose a lot of seats based on current polling, but that is more down to a blatantly undemocratic electoral system than to how the party is polling.
I speak to some hardcore Corbyn supports and their passion is incredible, but alas, only one person get a vote and for all someone passion a pensioner will vote Conservative out of habit and inertia.
That is how resistance will be framed and it could play just as well here, but I hope I'm wrong.