Someone back in 2001 famously said, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack on New York, that it was “a good day to bury bad news”. She has rightly disappeared into obscurity. Anyway, with all the ridiculous end-of-the-world saying around the financial crisis, it’s a good time to remember that there is other stuff going on apart from bankers looking stressed and people worrying about their houses being worth less than a box of fudge. I defer to Charlie Brooker on the whole issue of the financial crisis, suffice to say that it remains to be seen with the benefit of more time and hindsight whether everything that is happening at the moment is truly an epoch-making sequence of events, or yet another media-orchestrated orgy of hyperbole. One of the truest words I have heard to describe the whole situation is ‘correction’. For a long time now, the British have had a very bloody peculiar relationship with property, money and debt.
So back to what else is happening while the bankers furrow their brows on the news and Tesco spends a fortune advertising cheap ketchup. We’re still heading towards a very unpleasant situation, not with money, but with civil liberties. Pre-charge detention for terror suspects may still be extended to 42 days. In case you think there’s no way this can affect you, think about biometric passports, surveillance of your email and telephone communications, and the multifarious other interconnected ways that the government is working on to assign everyone and everything a place in a database or on an identity card that will do nothing to make us safer from the big bad bogey men but will inch us closer to the kind of society that Winston Smith lived in. Is this being alarmist? Boiling frogs come to mind.
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