No Sex, Please, We’re British

The libertarian magazine Reason has a guest column from Brendan O’Neill, who is one of the editors of the British political commentary website Spiked, wherein O’Neill talks about a current news story in the U.K. about a woman who was issued an “ASBO” (anti-social behavior order) because her neighbors complained that she made too much noise when having sex. She was recently arrested for violating the ASBO for, well, you can guess.

Giggle and titter about that as you will, O’Neill uses this case to illustrate the extent to which the U.K. has gone far beyond the “Nanny State” and descended into an Orwellian nightmare of a police state so intent on imposing social order that it has resorted to arresting people for loud sex. (You can see how this criticism would be very popular with libertarians, I trust). The British, after all, are the most surveilled people on Earth, with literally millions of closed-circuit television cameras situated in every imginable nook and cranny to constantly monitor public spaces. The ASBO, introduced in the mid-1990s was introduced as an effort to rein in street gangs and other hooliganism that run rampant in British cities, but has become a readily-abused law that can be applied to just about anything anyone doesn’t like and has created situations like people being arrested for wearing “threatening” hats or hoodie sweatshirts. And last week, you may recall, I linked to a story about London police similarly abusing an anti-terrorism law to randomly stop and search 170,000 people in 2008 without prosecuting a single terrorist.

O’Neill thus paints a picture of today’s average British citizen as something akin to the residents of the former East Germany — cowering in fear of the police and of neighbors who might rat them out to the authorities at any time, for any reason (including revenge or spite), encouraged to spy on one another. Recently BoingBoing featured some brilliantly scathing send-ups of the “see something, say something” poster campaign going on in the U.K. right now.

But this isn’t simply the ranting of a libertarian critic. A post at Slashdot yesterday links to a new report commissioned by a cybersecurity firm called Cryptohippie that ranks the nations of the world with regard to “police state” conditions based on a meta-analysis of criteria collected by a range of international privacy and civil rights interest groups such as EFF, EPIC, and Freedom House. The Cyberhippie report (available here as a PDF) concludes that the U.K. is Number Five in the world for police state restrictions and incursions on personal liberty. (Number One is China).

Why should we Americans care? We’re Number Six.

What I found particularly intriguing and disturbing about O’Neill’s article is the pull quote from George Orwell’s “1984″ that he uses to introduce the article:

“Unlike Winston, [Julia] had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship.”

In this country, the idea of the “nanny state” is often used to represent a collection of ideas and opinions that blame “political correctness” on liberals, but in truth the imposition of rigid social order and overbearing morality is a traditional behavior of the right, and the American Right’s crusades to oppose gay marriage and civil rights, to roll back affirmative action, to ban abortion, and a host of other social issues are part and parcel of the traditional right’s activities. A book called “The Conservative Nanny State” considers the real agenda behind “nanny state” and/or “police state” behavior and tries to pull back the curtain of deception to show how the creeping spectre of an American police state is the doing of the conservative movement.