The Bell Ringers
Page 45
Recently a Russian journalist named Irada Zeinalova described living in Britain for her audience at home thus: ‘Your moves are monitored by your bus tickets. There are CCTV cameras on every building and computer chips on the rubbish bin – and they can tell a lot about your life by studying your rubbish . . . Security has got absurd.’ This is precisely the kind of dispatch routinely sent home by western correspondents in the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev era. The picture that Zeinalova paints is difficult to deny. The British have become more closely watched than any other people in the west – maybe in the entire world. We have more CCTV cameras than the rest of Europe put together. CCTV infests not only streets and shopping centres, but restaurants, cinemas and pubs where, with the encouragement of the police and local officials, cameras record the head and shoulders of every individual one who enters.
People are watched the whole time. Road journeys are now monitored by cameras adapted to read car number plates and the data from every trip is kept for five years. This technology allows the authorities to target and track a vehicle in real time, a useful tool if the state wishes to keep tabs on a criminal but also equally useful for tracking political dissidents or climate change activists. Special Police teams are deployed to protest events with the sole purpose of filming innocent protestors and storing their data. Around the country, tens of thousands of people are stopped by the police and required to submit to searches under terror laws. According to the European Court of Human Rights, the genetic profiles of hundreds of thousands of innocent people are now illegally held on police DNA databases.
This depressing list makes you wonder – like Kate Lockhart – what happened in Britain. Why have the British public accepted, without a murmur of dissent, that their government has the right to access the data from everyone’s telephone and online communications, to monitor their children’s lives on a national database or demand over fifty pieces of information before a citizen can leave their own country? It seems extraordinary that at the time of writing we are committed to an ID card scheme that will record all the important transactions in a person’s life and hold the details indefinitely on the National Identity Register computers. The same applies to people’s health records, which will be stored centrally and open to inspection by vast numbers of medical professionals and – naturally – also government agencies. The potential for abuse is obvious in both systems yet there has been remarkably little outcry, which is odd given that Orwell noted that privacy was one of the defining characteristics of the British.
The laws that play a part in The Dying Light all exist. I make particular use of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, which, as my character George Lyme suggests, enables the Prime Minister, a minister, or the Government Chief Whip to dismantle democracy and the Rule of Law overnight. These powers can be invoked on the mere conviction that an emergency is about to take place, and there is no sanction against that person if the powers are invoked wrongly. Even in an academic study like The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 by Clive Walker and James Broderick (OUP, 2006) you sense the amazement of the authors at measures which allow for the suspension of travel, seizing of property, forced evacuation, special courts and arbitrary detention and arrest. In their conclusion they envision ‘an extensively securitised society with increasing focus on risk management and prevention and its attendant emanations such as pervasive surveillance and physical security, expensive equipment, remote and shadowy organisations and programmes, and the skewing of social agendas’. This description pretty much explains the state of affairs in The Dying Light. I stress that I have not made anything up: the law is all there, ready and waiting on the Stature Book, a fact that very few people in Britain perhaps appreciate.
One problem I did not expect while writing about the future was for my vision to be overtaken by events in the present day. No sooner did my fictional Prime Minister, John Temple, mention that he regretted failing to hold David Eyam’s inquest in camera than the current Justice Minister, Jack Straw, introduced a law allowing secret inquests. No sooner was the fictional Deep Truth programme drawing information from social networking sites, than the Home office announced a consultation with a view to granting the government access to data stored on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. I even began to wonder if a system like Deep Truth, a name inspired by a phrase in real government documents about data sharing, existed in reality.
The Dying Light is a pair to my novel Brandenburg (2005), which is set in the weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, which I witnessed as a journalist. Early in the evening on the night after the border opened, I walked through Checkpoint Charlie along Friedrich-strasse and into East Germany. The sense of evacuation in the dismal, poorly lit streets of East Berlin was very striking. After an hour or two, I turned and joined the crowds making their way towards the glow of the West and had the experience of moving with the East Berliners into that bright illuminated world that had lain out of reach on the other side of No Man’s Land for nearly three decades. The people from the East moved into the light and freedom at the same time. That theme is present throughout Brandenburg.
The Dying Light is about the reverse process – about a society that still has recognisably democratic institutions, free courts and a free media but is ineluctably drawn towards the night. Objectively, it is intriguing to witness, especially the curious absence of concern, and I have often wondered what Orwell would have made of it. Maybe there is an explanation in his London Letter for the Partisan Review at the end of the war when he wrote about returning from the continent and seeing England with fresh eyes, ‘The pacifist habit of mind, respect for freedom of speech and belief in legality have managed to survive here while seemingly disappearing on the other side of the Channel.’ He went on to muse on the lack of public reaction of any kind during the war, which seems almost unbelievable in these emotionally charged times. ‘In the face of terrifying dangers,’ he wrote, ‘people just keep on keeping on in a twilight of sleep in which they are conscious of nothing except the daily round of work, family life, darts at the pub, exercising the dog, mowing the lawn, bringing home the beer etc etc’. Later he concludes, ‘I don’t know whether this semi-anaesthesia in which the British people contrive to live is a sign of decadence, as many observers believe, or whether on the other hand it is a kind of instinctive wisdom.’
Then, as now, the British defy analysis. Are we building the most advanced systems of surveillance ever seen in a free society because deep down we are so sure of our democratic values, our respect for free speech and legality, that we know that whatever happens nothing will change us? Or does our stoicism, our determination to ‘keep on keeping on’ and not get too worked up about things, amount to a fatal complacency? It is difficult to know the answer today but in just a few years time we will.
Henry Porter
London, May 2009
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Pamela Merritt, who read and corrected the first drafts of this novel, and also to my former editor at Orion, Jane Wood. The astute suggestions of my new editor at Orion, Jon Wood, as well as a close reading by my agent, Tif Loehnis of Janklow and Nesbit, contributed significantly to the final form of The Dying Light. There are several other people I would like to thank for their help – sometimes unwitting – particularly The Earl of Onslow, Murray Hunt and Andrew Dismore MP of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. Jay McCreary, the video/audio investigator for CY4OR gave me invaluable advice on his speciality of visual forensics, and Dr Ian West, who is a carbonate-evaporite sedimentologist by trade, inspired me with his photographs of Shropshire’s unique geological formations. Jill Kirby of the Centre for Police Studies was responsible for the name of the system that plays such an important part in this story and which comes from government documents that she unearthed. Thanks to Patrick Garaux of the Alinéa Bindery who helped me with information about book binding, and Charles Fisher who gave me a room in which to write at Chateau de Felines and advice on the manuscript.
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This story takes place in some wonderful old buildings. I spent at lot of time in St Laurence’s Church, Ludlow, and poking around other parish churches in the Marches so I thank those who look after them so well. I am grateful to Dr Alan Ryan, the Warden of New College, Oxford, for allowing me so much freedom to roam in the buildings where I set a part of my story. I want also to thank Joanna Mackle of the British Museum, Dr John Curtis, the Keeper of the Middle East Department at the British Museum and Dr Irving Finkel who showed me round the Arched Room in the BM and explained cuneiform to me. Finally, thanks are due to Morgan Entreki who thought of The Bell Ringers as a title.