After Labour’s famous victory in 1997 I was a bit despondent, however I went off to University anyway, and gradually realised the change in government wasn’t going to cause the sky to fall on my head. In fact as far as I could tell nothing much changed at all – though other people I knew were talking about good things happening in terms of jobs, public services and the economy. When the 2001 poll came round I still wasn’t very politically minded, however I saw that Labour wanted to scrap tuition fees for students, and this was enough to swing my vote. As a student myself and with a sister about to start University, where she would be charged for her own tuition at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds, this was a policy I could get behind.

So I voted Labour in 2001. Then everything changed – both personally and in terms of global politics. The twin towers fell four months into Labour’s second term. I’d flown back from the states just three days before and the week afterwards I was to start my first proper job as a graduate. Looking back now, it seems like this was the point at which the rot set into the Labour party, not from an economic standpoint but from a social perspective.

I started paying attention to politics after 9/11, and the more I did so, the more disillusioned I became with the Government. Never mind their broken promises on tuition fees – Labour were systematically dismantling our civil liberties. Aided by the media, they were exploiting the spectre of international terrorism in order to turn the UK into an authoritarian surveillance-state. As a result we now live in a society built on the politics of fear – only the Chinese and the Russians are more closely watched. Our Government no longer serves us – it controls us.

I voted Liberal Democrat in 2005. I became a member of the party in 2007 and I voted for them again in 2010. I want to live in a society that values privacy, liberty, freedom, human rights and democracy. In my opinion the Liberal Democrats are the only party that has consistently held these values, not as soundbytes, but as the very foundations of the party.

I hope this election marks the point at which the swing of the social pendulum starts to reverse – moving away from authoritarianism and towards libertarianism.

Whatever you hope, and however you’re planning to vote, I urge you to reject the politics of fear. Vote for what you believe in – not against something you don’t.

Happy General Election 2010!

“Police initially believed a local man was trying to groom the children by befriending them online and arranging to meet them.”

The subsequent discovery that it was probably just a bunch of kids winding each other up seems to have prompted a Bostonic over-reaction[1]:

“This will be treated seriously and we will be contacting the families of the children involved and we will try and help them by involving social services” … “It sounds like a very extreme and worrying course of action”.

Crikey. Should we really be calling in social services and the police to deal with 10-year-olds bullying each other? Consider what the response would have been if the the headline had read “Pupils posing as the bogeyman in cyber-bullying, police warn” or even “Pupils posing as teachers in cyber-bullying, police warn”? To me it sounds like the real story is “Bullying buzzwords cause grown-up over-reaction”.

I don’t wish to imply that bullying isn’t a serious issue, but it has to be handled appropriately, proportionately and in the correct context. This constant hysterical frothing in the press over words like “cyber” and “paedophile” is causing more harm than it is selling newspapers. Er, I mean helping kids.

As with the existing system, the new (slightly simplified) threat levels will have specific meanings for various official and industrial organisations. Government, the security services, the armed forces and other elements of our critical national infrastructure will all have defined actions to take when warnings are issued, and will instructed on how to act when the threat is at a given level.

The difference with this new system is that the public have been made a part of it. Strangely, however, no guidance has been issued on how you should react to the different levels of threat.

When the measures were announced, a government official appeared on Radio Four’s P.M. programme to advise that (paraphrasing) “the public should be especially vigilent at all threat levels. The higher the level, the more vigilent they should be. However if the level is reduced, they should be no less vigilent”.

Got that? Good.

Claiming all this is a good idea, David Davis (Shadow Home Secretary) said that the new system will, “increase both public confidence and public vigilence.” However it seems more likely that the increases will be in public fear and public speculation. It is distinctly less clear how publicising the threat level will help to combat terror, especially if you don’t know what to do in response.

Using fear to exercise control is a well known and well used strategy. From the Inquisition to the cold war to modern-day terrorism, those in power have used fear to sell their policies. In this case, the government seems to believe you are safer when worrying about unexplained changes to unspecified threats than when debating and challenging their home affairs agenda, from which this system seems designed to distract. You are encouraged to consider what the threat might be, and then to fear it, rather than to challenge the government’s interpretation of, and reaction to, the supposed terror threat.

Given that terrorism is so fantastically rare, even in the prevailing state of international politics, we should all be suspicious of Government claims about unspecified threats.

In matters of security, everone has an agenda.