I can only post that I’m totally amazed that this fact isn’t widely recognised – if it isn’t. The fact has been confirmed often enough on the BBC website. If more is needed, the link to the Carter prison review in #27 above here provides official confirmation.

FWIW my impression is that Blair got a notion that more and longer prison sentences would help New Labour to beat the Tories, just as he thought that getting involved in a few high-profile wars going would enable NL to capture a patriotic factor and demonstrate that a Labour government could run a war as well as the Tories.

I take it that this is what the Blairites mean when they go on about the need for strong leadership. Personally, I think that Samuel Johnson had an astute intuition when he said: Patriotism is last refuge of the scoundrel. As for the strong leadership stuff, I’m always reminded of something Lord Beaverbrook said of Lloyd George that he “did not seem to care which way he travelled providing he was in the driving seat.”

Whatever else, don’t panic. As the man with a Scots accent in BBC news bulletins keeps saying: There is no fuel shortage, it’s just that people are buying too much. Now we know.

I think it is more that we don’t know. The tabloid rhetoric for years has been that we are soft on crime. Any time there is a headline about a prison sentence it’s about how this or that scrote has got off with just years in prison. I think most people would be genuinely shocked that we have such a high proportion of people in prison.

Btw a far greater threat to personal privacy than ID cards is the NHS national database of personal medical records currently under development at a projected cost of UKP 12 billions.

“Half of all GPs will consider refusing to put patient records automatically on to a new national database in defiance of the government, a survey finds. The Guardian newspaper poll of 1,026 GPs and hospital doctors found many doubted the security of the new system. Four out of five thought the confidentiality of their patients’ records would be at risk.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6167924.stm

It happens that my medical records don’t include embarrassing details about treatments for STDs, HIV or mental health issues but that is not true for all. With wide access to personal medical records, extending to local government officials, some (? many) fellow citizens will be put at risk of personal blackmail or workplace bullying and I wonder how employers or insurance companies and other financial institutions will react to a situation where they know that for a modest fee some investigator would be able to dig out and provide private personal information from the national database? Remember, with all this modernisation going on, even the Royals are vulnerable to having their phones tapped. The Royals were in a position to discover that and do something about it. How many of the rest of us are?

Umm…no. We’re too busy fighting ID cards and increases in detention to keep up with the whole of the gov.uk’s security state’s ambitions.

This review of prisons by Lord Carter, published last December, seems to be the latest thinking on establishing a sustainable policy:
http://www.justice.gov.uk/docs/securing-the-future.pdf

Quote from the executive summary:

“Since June 1995 the prison population in England and Wales has increased by 60%, or more than 30,000, to reach the record levels of population seen today. As a result of this, England and Wales has the highest prison population per capita in Western Europe. . .

“The prison system has performed well in improving the safety and decency in prison as well as the management of offenders. However, each prisoner costs the taxpayer, on average, £37,500 per year. This appears to be expensive in contrast to other jurisdictions such as Australia, New Zealand and the US, although direct cost comparisons are difficult to make.”

The trouble is not enough folks in government seem to have read this seminal paper by Gary Becker: Crime and Punishment – An Economic Approach (JPE 1968):
http://www.ww.uni-magdeburg.de/bizecon/material/becker.1968.pdf

By the official UK figures, it is hugely expensive keeping someone in prison:
http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm070109/text/70109w0018.htm

True but then the numbers in prison have just reached a new record high and that hasn’t stopped crime either:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7367438.stm

By whatever means of surveillance or pre-emption, “Scotland Yard anti-terror chief, Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick, told MPs – who are examining the Government’s controversial plans to extend the pre-charge detention limit to 42 days – that 15 terror plots have been foiled by police since the July 7 attacks.”
http://ukpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5i451r9hQLu_vTmIzXOMSRwcBzuqw

Like it or not, the curious fact is that on the evidence we British just don’t seem to care how many public CCTV cameras there are. And we don’t seem to care either that we keep more in prison per head of population than any other country in western Europe.

As I suspect Bruce Schneier could point out much more eloquently than I: that is nothing more that pure security theater since the cameras didn’t prevent the damage from occuring. Perhaps – perhaps – they helped track down the perps and prevent a repetition. But they had zero proactive effect so the privacy was given up for no return.

Cranky

The problem with this model is reliability of reporting – if you want real data and not just sacrificial fuel for your paranoid state furnaces. Cf. Stalin’s purges. Stanley Milgram’s experiment seems directly relevant here.

AI has the potential for greater consistency and reliability, and might be the real answer to the problem of too much data, but often actions can only be understood within the context of complex narratives, so I’m guessing (naively) that it would be very hard to implement in order to anticipate criminal/terrorist acts. On the other hand, if you can monitor the information a person is exposed to, track what catches their interest, and compile their social circle… you might well have a scary and wonderful data-net to explain what that blurry figure (with a known cellphone number) is doing on the CCTV feed.

We live on a very interesting cusp, right now: flashmobs are possible and can act suddenly and effectively, ahead of security forces. I wonder how long that will be true, and how far away we are from the instigators of flashmobs already being the targets of special surveillance before they even plan their first public acts.

Phonecams? Remember that meme a few years back, “short black dress… round of drinks… pictured on the internet with no knickers: priceless!” I don’t know quite what Foucault would have made of it, but it struck me as a remarkable bit of discipline.

Personally, I hardly ever visit bars, whether gay or not, and besides we have reached the stage where members of the Cabinet and MPs are openly gay. Try this: “[Matthew Parris] famously told interviewer Jeremy Paxman that there were two gay members of the then current Labour Cabinet, one being Peter Mandelson. He has stated that there are between thirty and sixty unannounced gay members of the UK parliament. In July 2006, in a list compiled by the Independent on Sunday, Parris was voted the 73rd most influential gay man in the United Kingdom.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Parris

For years, I’ve worked on the routine assumption that anyone with any kind of profile for political activism was likely to have their phone tapped and their email read. Paranoia? Not really.

One Saturday morning in January 2005 my phone rang at 9am. The guy on the phone asked why hadn’t I sent him the computer memory that he had bought from me on eBay for £109. The fact was that I’d not been on eBay at all, let alone to sell computer memory there. But someone had and had left my name and phone number as the vendor contact details. Fortunately, the money had been paid into a PayPal account and I don’t have a PayPal account of any kind.

The Police have regularly put out messages warning of identity theft.

Frighteningly, you’re probably right. Of course, people should spend a little more time thinking about the relative effectiveness of CCTV in tracking down the bombers versus its complete ineffectiveness in providing evidence for the de Menezes hearings a few weeks later. When the state controls the means of surveillance, you can be sure it will only be used against perceived enemies of the state (or enemies of state officials), never to hold the state accountable to its citizens.

This is what worries me:

The Watergate break-in on 17 June 1972 was an enterprising endeavour by the Republicans to gather political intelligence about the Democrats in the run-up to the US presidential election that year. Of course, the break-in amounted to burglary and was therefore illegal. How much better would it be if political intelligence could be gathered by surreptitious but lawful means – such as phone tapping one’s political opponents ostensibly as part of wider surveillance to track and prevent child pornography or terrorism, something which most citizens would heartily approve of?

In Britain, we have been near this territory before.

In the 1960s, Britain’s PM at the time, Harold Wilson, established a convention, termed the Wilson Doctrine, by which the security services are barred from tapping the fixedline phones of MPs. All subsequent PMs have reaffirmed this convention:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4614122.stm

The public rationale was and is that MPs are to be trusted but there were and are good pragmatic reasons for the convention, namely that competitive phone tapping to gather political intelligence could otherwise get out of hand. Anyone here who regards that as absurd might reflect on this recent criminal case concerning the freedom of the press to tap Royal telephones:

“The royal editor of the News of the World [a tabloid UK Sunday newspaper] has been jailed for four months for plotting to intercept voicemail messages left for royal aides.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6301243.stm