4,2-million cameras

One of my immediate impressions of Britain has been that there are an awful lot of CCTV cameras about. And not just on the streets where you might expect them, but also in B&Bs, cafés and shops.

I have since been astonished to learn that there is, in fact, one for every 14 people and that the average urban Briton is caught on camera up to 300 times a day, making him or her the most monitored civilian on the planet.

I tried telling all of this to a good friend of mine who phoned me up from Cape Town recently, but such is the scale of surveillance here that, unless you see it for yourself, it beggars belief. And that’s not even the least of it: apparently Middlesbrough has since last year experimented with “talking” CCTV cameras, which berate and shame public offenders in situ, while Manchester has issued head-mounted cameras to Robocop-styled parking wardens.

I said to my fishmonger yesterday: “You guys have all the cameras while we South Africans have all the crime.” His brow furrowed. “We are becoming a police state,” he warned.

Now, given South Africa’s horrendous crime statistics, one could imagine that some readers back home might be tempted to state the case for deterrence and say to hell with the principle of civil liberty. But as my fishmonger pointed out to me by way of a digression involving his son’s Romanian violin teacher, someone like Nicolae Ceausescu also advanced his totalitarian regime by the often-repeated adage that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry”.

Now I don’t think Gordon Brown is anything like that Carpathian tyrant. The point is, however, that a dangerous corrosion of the right to privacy is being accelerated, abetted by emergent technologies and endless wars.

The fundamental problem as I see it with CCTV cameras is that they are the antithesis of an endangered social value, namely trust. For without the belief in the basic bona fides of the ordinary person, society loses faith in relationships per se and becomes instead a paranoid dystopia. Irrational anxiety and unfounded suspicion course through the body politic.

There’s a disturbingly intemperate language being spoken in Britain today that reflects this: from the Metropolitan police commissioner’s call for the extension of detention without trial, in order to combat the “epidemic” of terrorism, to Martin Amis’s now infamous essay The Age of Horrorism, which recommends the collective punishment of the Muslim community even to the point of “deportation — further down the road”.

We shouldn’t forget that while all states have a duty to protect and secure, they firstly have a responsibility to promote and live out what their communities hold to be their highest constitutional goods and freedoms.

The ordinary British person seems to me to be a considerate, decent and trustworthy human being. But, looking around at all the CCTV cameras, you wouldn’t think so.