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Comment by bradley13 | Hacker News Reader

Wrongthink must be stamped out!

Seriously, what kind of dystopia are UK politicians trying to create?

Also, that's a lot of tax money that could, I dunno, be used to improve the schools?

AFAIK a lot of the depictions of dystopias are based on the UK government as opposed to the other way around. For example Terry Gilliam and George Orwell. The machinations were more overt in those times and a return to these dystopian circumstances is a more of a reversion to the mean than anything new or unique.

> Seriously, what kind of dystopia are UK politicians trying to create?

One where they constantly talk about conservative values of freedom while creating the most oppressive anti-protest laws and government surveillance in the western world.

The argument that I often read is that protecting democracy and democratic values often requires methods contrary to those democratic values (or not, as long as a democracy does it).

There’s a reason that 1984, V for Vendetta, Judge Dredd, etc. are all created by people in the UK.

Reading the article, I was actually thinking of Winston's girlfriend Julia and how wonderfully well she would do at Ofsted.

And Brazil.

They saw V for Vendetta and strive for it.

Didn't that movie end with the explosion of the Palace of Westminster?

> Didn't that movie end with the explosion of the Palace of Westminster?

“Who Really Runs Britain?: The Private Companies Taking Control of Benefits, Prisons, Asylum, Deportation, Security, Social Care and the NHS”

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Who-Really-Runs-Britain-Deportation..."

Simple FOI request to find out how much the program is costing. I doubt it’s cheap.

The Ministry of Truth intervenes in FOI requests:

> In 2020, the openDemocracy website published a report on the FOI Clearing House. The report described the Clearing House as "Orwellian" and found that it requires government departments to send it requests that are potentially sensitive or too expensive to answer. The report also found that the Clearing House sometimes requires departments to provide it with drafts of responses to FOI requests for vetting. According to the report, government ministers were hindering FOI requests in "disturbing" ways and the number of FOI requests granted by departments had decreased. The Cabinet Office said the Clearing House was designed to "ensur[e] there is a standard approach across government in the way we consider and respond to requests".

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/nov/24/orwellian-g...

A chap I know worked for comms at a government-adjacent state-funded org - he mentioned the same thing there. They just have an internal performance metric of around 80% of FOI requests they should answer, and they use the remaining 20% for awkward or expensive queries.

Different meanings of "improve", I guess.

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