Only the illegal are free
Huddled in the back of a lorry that has just rolled off the ferry at Dover, in a few minutes time you’ll be speeding up the M20 towards London and a new life living and working as an illegal immigrant in the UK. The government won’t know you exist... The lorry driver on the other hand has been thoroughly and electronically examined in fine detail. His whereabouts have been known to the government since he decided to travel abroad. This will be heralded as a success by the eBorders team as they search their database looking for the guilty needles in the haystack.
This article in the Daily Telegraph highlights, what is now fast becoming a common theme of government attempts at security: everyone is potentially guilty and to protect you from yourselves they have to know all they can about you, including where you travel to. And as the eBorders spokesman says, they’ve already discovered that 0.00353% of travellers are in fact wanted criminals. This is heralded as a success; that the rest of us, under governmental threat of being fined have ‘willingly’ shared our data with them. This is us proving to the government that we have nothing to hide, and therefore nothing to fear; self-perpetuating their own rhetoric so that they continue to believe that they are on the correct policy path.
The majority of legislation introduced in relation to the apparent security of our nation, and ourselves, has contained a comparable threat to our own liberty which has forced us into compliance. Were this a private firm we would have long ago ended the contract and sought others who do not treat us as criminals from the outset. Perhaps the solution open to us is that we should all decide to become illegal immigrants, especially as it no longer seems this country is one that we are allowed to feel at home in.
