SO its official. The UK is a surveillance state. This the conclusion of the UK Information Commisioner, Richard Thomas. It ranges from monitoring of all tele-communications and email by your friendly neighbourhood security agency – no not MI5 or the SIS but NSA, yep they are American not British – to more discrete marketing surveillance in the name of customer profiling ("dataveillance") garnered by loyalty cards, credit card transactions and mobile phone useage. And nice to know that we only have to share one CCTV camera between 14 of us in the glorious United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland putting us proudly at the top of the league for CCTV cameras per person. Add this to GPS transmitters fitted to company vehicles, keystroke monitoring in some organisations , the largest DNA database both by number and per capita and it makes you wonder what “they” don’t know or could n’t find out about us.

So an Englishman’s (and Scot’s, Ulster and Welsh) home is his castle. Its just the most observed and monitored castle in the world. Mr Thomas states

“We really do have a society which is premised both on state secrecy and the state not giving up its supposed right to keep information under control while, at the same time, wanting to know as much as it can about us."

And furthermore

“Today I fear that we are in fact waking up to a surveillance society that is already all around us,"

Well that’s nice. I know lets make this all simpler.

How could we bring more detailed information on each and every individual in the country in an easy to access format?

Oooh, I know what about ID cards. We can say they’ll help on the war against terrorism and organized crime – people will love that.

But won’t that need a big computer system?

Yeah well probably. Still we can probably get the people who are working on the NHS Digital Patient Records system to look at it for us.

But didn’t several of those companies already leave the project handing millions back to the Government as they believe the project will be such a disaster it will harm their international reputation, not to mention that it will be unsecure, unreliable and very late.

Yeah, well there is that.

And won’t it cost a lot of money?

Well only £5.6billion according to our figures.

But I thought the LSE calculated a cost of somewhere between £10.6 billion and £19.2 billion.

Ah don’t worry it’ll be self-financing - we’ll get the public to pay for that by making the system voluntary.

How does that work then?

Well if you need a new Passport then we’ll charge you the £100 for the ID card as well. Simple.

But how is that voluntary?

Well you don’t have to have a passport do you? Unless you want to leave the country of course. And why would you want to do that? If you leave we won’t be able to keep an eye on you. For your own safety of course!

Still, nice to know that rebellion still burns brightly in the UK. But the torch is now held by the youth of the country, most likely to torch a wheelie bin or light a spliff no doubt if todays report is to be believed. British teenagers are top the Euro table for underage sex, smoking, drinking, fighting and petty crime aswell as many other such social skills. Plus another report says that these same “kids” look on ASBOs as a “badge of honour” or a “diploma”. So all this despite the all the government’s ill-drafted new laws, massive surveillance presence, increased police numbers and powers etc.

But don’t worry we’re winning the war on terror………………

And there’s the whole angle on flying that I was going to jot down but after that I’m not sure I should in case I mysteriously disappear from the street one day, despite the CCTV cameras’ omnipresence.