The convenient myth of the sneering, Big Brother council

As with so many things, it's all SEGA's fault.

“Britain” is quite a nice name for a country, when you think about it: it’s better than “Paraguay” (which is hard to spell), and “Liberia” (which sounds like a type of food poisoning), or “Bumholezania” (which isn’t real). The problem with “Britain”, though, is that it alliterates with certain words or phrases which appeal so much to salivating newspaper editors that they can sometimes get carried away with the simple joy to be had in sticking them together, without thinking too hard about whether it’s appropriate.

These are the sorts of words which really appeal to the part of us that, as life’s wheelbarrow trundles us inevitably closer towards being tipped onto death’s compost heap, begins to insist that everything was better in the good old days and the modern world as we know it is all going to hell in a grime-smeared, rickety pushchair. You know: words like “Broken” or “Bankrupt” – or “Big Brother”.

Ah, yes. Him. ‘Big Brother Britain’ has been splashing about in the tabloid paddling pool for a good few years now, and was out in force last week with the revelations of Oxford council’s plans to stuff cameras in the back of all its taxis, which would record everybody’s conversations as they pootle about the town.

The problem with these sorts of stories is that they always spin out the same way, as a tale of good honest everyday Britons having their privacy shattered by a legion of interfering, self-centred and downright evil council types following their crazed agenda to SPY on EVERYBODY and THEIR BINS. Now, there are plenty of things worth getting upset about with this Oxford scheme – but this isn’t one of them.  The council had an increase in taxi-related crimes to deal with, and the way that councils are structured and assessed means that they need to handle things in a certain way. Let’s think about that a bit more: they have precise budgets for specific projects which must be closely monitored. They prefer a visible, immediate solution, because that makes them look more pro-active in the eyes of both the public and their central government superiors. They probably have specific, quantified targets to reach, which mean they need something that they can easily talk about in numerical terms. Preferably, it should also be something a lot of other councils have done before, so that it’s not your fault if it doesn’t work. If it comes from a massive company, all the better – they have sophisticated accounting systems that make life easier, and a track record long enough that nobody can accuse you of picking a dud supplier (in theory, anyway).

So, you’re Oxford council, and you need to sort out the rising number of wrong’uns being naughty all over your Hackney carriages. What do you do? Increase police presence at taxi ranks? Enormously expensive, and likely a waste of highly-trained officers. An awareness campaign? Fiddly to design and a little bit, well, wet. CCTV, though, now there’s an idea! It’s (relatively) cheap, it can cover every taxi, and we can stick in there just as quickly as we can buy the equipment. Back of the net!

Of course, this is all ignoring the fact that it’s questionable whether CCTV really does reduce crime, and that the cameras themselves often break down because nobody’s bothered to maintain them. But these don’t matter really, because the CCTV industry has long been able to adapt itself to the way councils work, smoothing the wrinkles out of the difficult commissioning process and promising a great result, at a low price, fast and in a way that everyone will see. An all-in-one-box solution that’s easy to put on a balance sheet, and immediately lets you wheel out impressive numbers in sentences such as “We have just commissioned six thousand CCTV cameras to combat the nefarious whistling epidemic sweeping the town’s libraries.”

Council workers aren’t evil, then – they might be a tad naive or lazy, but generally they’re not actively malicious. They’re just people after all: dull, ordinary people like you and me, and just as susceptible as we are to the slick sales and the glamour of technology.

Is this really the product of evil masterminds, or could it just be a rather more pedestrian bout of human fallibility?

Where, then, does all this acidic vitriol come from? Time and time again, an organisation called Big Brother Watch pops up prominently in these stories: like here, for example, or here. Nobody seems to have pointed out to them the irony of putting the word “Watch” in the name of a supposedly anti-surveillance organisation, but we’ll skip that for now. BBW – as I’m going to enjoy calling it from now on – is a spin-off from The Taxpayer’s Alliance, which supposedly campaigns against government waste and was a bit of a media darling itself, back in the day, until people started to suspect that it might not be all it seemed. Indeed, it turned out that behind this supposedly populist, grassroots crusade on behalf of everyday Joe Taxpayer, lurked a large bivouac’s worth of people linked to higher-ups in the Conservative party – specifically, the sort of Conservatives who were upset with all this centrist coalition nonsense and wanted to send things further right again. So, rather sneakily, they began lobbying furiously for lower taxes, ignoring all other options for reforming the treasury and disguising this very specific agenda, dreamed up by a small group of elite ideologues for their own particular benefit, as something else entirely – a well-meaning, friendly campaign group, the result of a spontaneous upswell of public concern and discontent.

The same is true of Big Brother Watch – the Dannii Minogue to the Alliance’s Kylie. The two organisations share the same Executive Director, and BBW’s other staff have previously worked for Conservative Home, the No to AV Campaign and David Cameron. When they come up with an incendiary soundbite like, say, this one: “Councils are waiting until the public aren’t watching to begin surveillance on our waste habits, intruding into people’s private lives and introducing punitive taxes on what we throw away” – they’re not trying to defend your privacy, so much as convince you that councils are bad because they want you to start resenting the tax that you pay to them. Because they hate tax. They loathe it. Tax killed their parents – no, tax ate their parents, and shat them out all over the beloved family spaniel. Let’s beat up the council with sticks and never pay them a penny again!

Whether these are good politics/economics or not isn’t the issue here. There’s nothing wrong with a campaign group being driven by an ideology –hey, they all are – it’s just the deception that doesn’t sit right, the romantic pretence that it’s all just a bunch of upstanding working folk banding together to defend against injustice. It’s not – it’s a lobby group, arguing in favour of a very narrow, specific set of interests.

Normally, when they’re quoting a lobby group, the media wraps it safely in disclaimers by making its leanings clear – as in “the left-wing IPPR” or “Policy Exchange, a think tank close to David Cameron.” They tread carefully. But BBW gets away with being labelled as a “privacy campaign” – continuing the myth that it’s a politically neutral assembly of the righteously upset – and, what’s more, like the TaxPayer’s Alliance before it, BBW knows how to get itself into print. It churns out good press releases that can be turned into copy with minimum effort. It supplies ready-made soundbites from its directors so journalists don’t have to bother going out to find them. In other words, it sells itself to the media in the same way that CCTV sells itself to councils: by offering the path of least resistance.

And it’s infuriating, because it means that every time something like this Oxford taxi kerfuffle comes around, we can’t use it as a starting point for bigger debates about privacy rights or the problems with government IT procurement because it’s all drowned out by the noise of BBW shrieking “COUNCIL SWINE SMASH THEM SMASH THEM” until they turn a funny shade of maroon and have to lie down in the park for a bit.

It’s not healthy, you know, all that sustained artificial rage. They’ll give themselves a hernia one of these days.