Matthew Norman: We are the world leaders in ineptitude
The good news, however, is that the nightmare David Davis envisions, or affects to, isn’t going to happen. The creation and maintenance of a police state demands discipline, rigour and fierce competence, so if we want one of those we’ll have to call in the Chinese, the Belarussians or surviving veterans of the Stasi, and hand the Home Office over to them. As with everything else, we British wouldn’t have the first clue how to make it work.
Posted on June 13th, 2008 at 9:12 am
Surely the danger is that the government keep TRYING to make it work and dig us into a deeper and deeper hole.
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You don’t need to be particularly competent to run a police state - in fact, “incompetence” can be a boon. Or does Mr Norman imagine that everyone swept up by the Stasi and the KGB really were guilty?
The point of a police state is to grind the population down with fear. To do that effectively, you need everyone to believe that it could happen to them, regardless of what they may or may not have done. Rounding people up on the flimsiest of pretexts (or no pretext at all), or just occasionally picking up the wrong guy because his name was misspelt on the order (how was I to know about Mr Buttle’s heart complaint? - it wasn’t on Mr Tuttle’s records) is all part of the process.
Has Matthew Norman read ever anything about Northern Ireland during the 1970s? You don’t actually need to be very competent to lock people up for long periods of time without charge. People who’ve often been plucked out of their beds at 4am by the large mob of heavily armed men in uniform who kicked in their door.
In fact, as Gillespie & Bew point out in Northern Ireland: A Chronology of the Troubles, 1968-1999, it may have precisely been a lack of competence that created those tactics in the first place…
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