Back in Airstrip One – Big Brother Still Here

And so I am back in Airstrip One. After eight weeks without wearing a seat belt, smoking where I wanted and not being photographed by a camera everywhere I went, Big Brother was on the case pretty quickly. As I wandered onto the station I prepared to climb stairs to the platform. Blue arrows marked the side to go up, red circles marked the other channel. Is there a bye-law on this? What happens if I dashed up the red button side? Was there a man at the top preparing to send me down again? How did we cope before we were told which side of the banister we had to walk?

There was a sign telling me to hold the banister as I climbed the stairs. Another sign telling me not to use my mobile (not that I have one) as I ascended or descended. And a third sign warning me that the stairs might be slippery if it is raining. No shit. Give Network Rail a Nobel Prize for Physics for working that one out. What is the penalty for walking up the wrong side holding a mobile and not the banister? Has the Health & Safety committee studied this fully? Is it law or just a rule created by assertion? At the top of the stairs I was reminded every ten minutes that I was in a no smoking zone. How is anyone else affected by me lighting up on an open air platform ventilated by a stiff breeze? Of course, the answer is not in the slightest but in Airstrip One that is not the point. Smoking just has to be snuffed out. I have the right to damage my own body (no-one else’s) by eating 25 Mars Bars a day but not to smoke in the open air. Big Brother says so. Who am I to argue?

For comfort, and rather missing the Greek attitude to the smoking ban (ignore it completely) I glanced at the Daily Telegraph. I rather wish I had not bothered. One lead story is about how Tory Minister Damian Green thinks that for his party to win it must “pass the Danny Boyle” test. If you can bear to read on, Green argues:

Much in this country needs changing and improving; but we should not become nostalgists promoting a better yesterday. We need to pass the Danny Boyle test, and cheer the numerous virtues of Britain in 2012. If we don’t like modern Britain, then it is very unlikely that modern Britain will like us.

Just as we should not turn away from David Cameron’s original correct decision to modernise the Conservative approach, so we should recognise that the historically successful ideal of “One Nation Conservatism” also needs consistent updating. Burke and Disraeli are sources of much wisdom, but they do not have the last word on how to help the North as well as the South, how to encourage the better integration of all minority groups, and how to remove the remaining barriers hindering women.

Oh dear. I shall glass over the way that Boyle’s Olympics ceremony was simply not historically accurate ( for starters where were the speed cameras in the Britain 2012 scenes and why did not 1 in 5 of the dancers sit down as we approached 2012 and just do nothing for the rest of the show other than accept a welfare cheque).

In the face of a country with a record debt, running a budget deficit, interfered with by a EU which most folk want out of, with a failing education system and an NHS that (as the world’s third largest employer) simply does not work efficiently and with a political elite that is corrupt, despised and out of touch, Green reckons that to be loved his party needs to work on closing the North South divide and reaching out to women and minorities.

Frigging hell. I suspect most women, Northerners and minorities would just settle for a Government that a) told the truth (deficit non-reduction), b) kept its promises (Lisbon), c) showed basic standards of integrity ( i.e. not bringing expense fiddlers back into Government but prosecuting them – Laws) and above all showed some basic shred of economic competence rather than one that spendt all its time trying to work out not how to be effective but just how to be liked. As a straight, while, able –bodied, Southern male my overwhelming desires of the Government are the same as all the minorities he mentions. It is just that he and his dismal colleagues seem unable to deliver on anything at all.

As if to rather prove my point the other lead story in The Telegraph concerns Government plans to allow local councils to impose a stack of new fines on motorists for heinous offences such as driving in a bus or cycle lane. Will this make the roads safer? The evidence from London where Councils already have such power is utterly inconclusive (but it did rake in £50 million in fines last year). This will simply allow increase back door taxation of a certain class of people who are unable to fight back in a way that is unpleasant and will cause resentment. It is also an excuse for the installation of yet more spy cameras. Ministers in their chauffeured limousines maybe do not understand how easy it is to accidentally dip into a bus lane or to do 35 in a 30 mile zone ( maybe Chris Huhne’s wife might give them a briefing on the latter). But as always, some animals are more equal than others.

I do not need Danny Boyle to tell me all the things that are wonderful about Britain. Nor why I love so much about this place. I resent being told by the New Statesman that thanks to Danny Boyle patriotism is respectable again and has been reclaimed by the mainstream or ( heaven help us) “the Left”. Some of us never felt embarrassed about being from the British islands and know that liking your country is not a matter of right or left and never was. But equally my return to an island with one camera for every 14 citizens just reminds me of these daily frustrations that are a feature of life today in Airstrip One. Or perhaps Damian Green thinks that only white, male, able-bodied, straight, Southerners find these sorts of things intensely annoying?