More Tsarism, this time of the Euro variety:
European Union leaders agreed yesterday to rush forward a clutch of EU-wide surveillance measures and created an anti-terror “Tsar” in response to the Madrid bombings.
The list of counter-terrorism measures pushed by Britain, France and Spain at a Union summit in Brussels include plans to retain mobile telephone records, e-mail and internet data indicating the time and address of all websites visited.
White Rose has further EUro-reportage and links about similar EUro-stuff, here and here.
This report also illustrates the point that EUrope is not just a machine to enable foreigners to muck the British around, it is also a machine to enable to British to muck the foreigners around: a sort of universal substitute empire for all the old European imperialists. Having been made to stop tyrannising over their previous imperial possessions, the tyrannising classes have switched instead to tyrannising over each other’s nations. Bad luck on the rest of us, but there it is, these people have to have someone to tyrannise over.
Meanwhile, proof that when the Euro elite wants something, it just beavers away until it gets it:
A new summer deadline for agreement on the EU constitution has been agreed by European leaders, putting renewed pressure on Tony Blair and his non-negotiable “red lines”.
Mr Blair had seemed content for the troubled constitution to slip off the agenda after December’s summit ended in deadlock. But a new deadline for agreement on the document has been set.
Although, when the time comes that the people who want EUrope to fall to bits are finally in the ascendancy, they will have the perfect precedent for saying: “We are going to keep on destroying this thing until we succeed, and will ignore all counter-opinions, of, e.g. voters, because these opinions are anti-historical and do not matter. We are doing what we know to be best. Our opponents are deluded. That’s what the founders of this thing did when they started it, and we are merely following their inspiring example.”
Trouble is, by the time that happens, those people may be even nastier.
I will read this piece by David Carr to cheer myself up.
I’ve begun to wonder why the EU doesn’t mandate tape recorder and mini-camera implants for the entire citizenry to provide 24/7 “coverage” on all its citizenry as the “final solution” to solving the problem of terrorism.
There were after all several holes in the “coverage” of the devices used by Big Brother in the Orwell tome. And with today’s technology…
Surely the terrorists would also agree to such implants.
Wouldn’t they?
Better yet various negative comments or gestures relating to EU officials could more readily be captured and miscreants quickly brought to “justice.”
And the benefits to “officials” with a penchant for prOn would be undeniable.
Christ, Europe sucks. Instead of going after the terrorists, the EU is setting its sights on its citizens. Your rights are being trashed and it probably won’t even make a difference as the terrorists continue to go after “soft targets”, ie Europe.
You (English Libertarians) got it rough. Terrorists, salivating after Madrid, on one end and Euro Statist Beuracrats chompin at the bit ready to “protect” you with cameras and micro chips and of course more EU beuracracies on the other side.
Good luck, you need it. Come to the US, maybe we can trade some of our sophisticated nuanced francophiles for some hard working British libertarians.
Fine! Appoint a Terrorism Czar! But just one thing. Can we please, please, pretty-please spell it like English-speakers? Czar reminds us that the word has a link to Latin, and the Caesars. Tsar reminds us that we, as English-speakers, are for some reason required to pronounce everyone else’s words like they do.
And beware my rant on how we have to call Peking Beijing, but the French get away with saying Angleterre and Londres…
Let’s just get on with joining the modern world and the European fold.
In any case there isn’t really that much of significance in the EU constitution that the UK isn’t signed up to already.
Why do the beer-gutted, measly-minded, spider’s-web- tatooed, bring back the Empire howling, Murdoch-press reading. mealy-mouthed, soft-underbellied, gutless Europhopes have to dictate that we need a referendum?
Why for heaven’s sake?
‘Why do the beer-gutted, measly-minded, spider’s-web- tatooed, bring back the Empire howling, Murdoch-press reading. mealy-mouthed, soft-underbellied, gutless Europhopes have to dictate that we need a referendum?’
As opposed to the arti-farti, tranzi, multi-culti, Europhiliac shitheds, easy riders and bureaucratic bullies who think they know better than the ‘dumb’ majority who would like a democratic choice about if and when to dump their own Constitutional Parliamentary Democracy in return for a Mafia carve-up? Your satire is very humorous!
Clair
BTW any relation to Watt?
clair tyler wrote: “Let’s just get on with joining the modern world and the European fold.” As if the two were one and the same, and equally obviously desirable. I think that should have a serious answer rather than just a counterblast of name-calling, even if she then goes on to hint that everyone who opposes these self-evidently worthwhile things is a lumpenprole.
Allow me to list some things I don’t think we may assume:
1. That “modern” is meaningful, not just a term of approbation for those things certain people like or would like.
2. That “modern”, if it does mean new, is always better than old.
3. That in order to be modern it is necessary to join the EUroproject.
4. That the EUroproject itself is modern in intent or effect.
5. That one would necessarily want one’s country to join a pan-European state (Europa).
6. That if Europa is a good idea that the EU as it stands or as augmented by the “Constitution” is the sort of state one would like to live in.
7. That the “Constitution” on offer is fit either for the EU or (any) Europa. (It isn’t just a constitutive document, but those institutional arrangements that it does specify are profoundly flawed, in my view.)
8. That the process initiated and direction set by the “Constitution” are themselves desirable as means.
9. That the means will lead to the desired Europa.
Oh of course terror attacks on the scale of what went down in Madrid are only going to play into the hands of what the statist EUrocrats would like, the expansion of their power, ‘to protect you’.
And I don’t reasonably see any way in the near to mid future that there are going to be fewer cameras watching us in public spaces, in Europe, the EU or pretty damn well anywhere else that can afford them and the attendant network infrastructure to make them useful.
That being the case, the only way I can see for any shred of public liberty to remain is for David Brin’s idea of making ALL surveillance camera’s totally open access. Including all of the ones in the local police station, of course. Then everyone can watch the watchers.
Guy Herbert
Surely it all comes down to the fact that the majority of the British people (flawed though their ‘intellectual’ capacity may be) still have enough visceral pride left in their genetic heritage to abhor the concept of being ruled from Brussels. It’s bad enough being ruled by its current treasonous agents in Westminster, but at least we have an opportunity to vote them out. And a robust reply to their propagandists doesn’t come amiss sometimes, particularly as a riposte to the condescending crap offered by Ms Tyler. You prefer sweet reasonableness and the measured art of argument and word by word analysis: that is your right. I prefer to respond occasionally to bullshit with the old fashioned, albeit uncouth, retort, “Bollocks!”
So in any future posts, I promise not to lecture you if you will undertake not to lecture me, particularly when I wasn’t addressing your post but that of another. I only accept admonishments from septuagenarians and older, incidentally, with a special dispensation for Verity whom I occasionally allow to put me straight, with no complaint. And I’m basing my assumption that you are both under seventy, in the case of Verity as she is obviously in the full bloom of womanhood, and as for yourself, because you wouldn’t be as pompous if you hailed from my generation. How’s that for ‘name calling?
Guy Herbert
My apologies, I just re-read your post and espied the modifying word ‘just’ at the point where it may indicate that you wanted to play the hard-cop soft-cop strategy, rather than, necessarily, disapproving of my knee-jerk ass-kicking. Must be the clocks going forward that has made me tetchy.
David Mercer: I think John Brunner got there first by a long way in Shockwave Rider (1975!), with a deeper idea: If privacy is to be abolished then the only way of freeing us from the surveillance of those in power is to level things up, for everybody to be allowed to know anything. Brin’s camera suggestion is just a special case.
The seminal piece in the Daily Mail today by Melanie Phillips today (see Melanie Phillips.com) on Blair’s latest Machiavellian manoeuvring on the European Constitution is a coruscating analysis. I wonder whether anyone on this blog disagrees with a word of it?