THE COMING TOTALITARIAN STATE

The Government has just announced plans to update the Postal Service.  The proposal, to be implemented shortly, is designed to empower the Revenue and Customs to obtain access to the public mail from the Post Office.  The plan is entirely benign, the Government assures us - it is purely designed to prevent tobacco smuggling through the post!

This is I imagine the first most people will have heard of the dire threat tobacco smuggling in letters and parcels poses to the nation’s survival, and I imagine I am not alone in wondering whether it occurs at all to any extensive degree.  (Don't worry - the Revenue is fully capable of providing the 'evidence', in the unlikely event of its being required to do so).

While interference with the Royal Mail existed in Tudor and Stuart times, the practice was refined and greatly extended under the military dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell.  Although it continued to a lesser degree throughout the eighteenth century, justified in part by fear of Jacobite conspiracies, Government spying on private correspondence was widely regarded with contempt and revulsion.  (A modern note was struck by Sir Robert Walpole’s suspected misuse of the system for personal commercial advantage.  Current MPs will doubtless lick their lips on learning of this precedent).

With the Allied victory over Napoleon in 1815, covert inspection of mail lost much of its legitimacy, but nevertheless continued behind the scenes.   The relative moderation with which it was implemented is, however, illustrated by the fact that it was not until 1844 that the public became unexpectedly alerted to the existence of the pernicious practice.

As an historian of the Post Office has written,
‘In 1844 the public learned with general surprise that letters sent through the Post Office were liable to be detained, opened and read by government officials, that the hated Secret or Inner Office ... was still active.  The horror and disgust at this well-nigh forgotten spy system aroused much concern and general condemnation’.

Questions were raised in Parliament, and expressions of outrage arose from every side.  Macaulay, the famous historian, objected that there was no difference ‘between the government breaking the seal of his letter in the Post Office, and the government employing a spy to poke his ear to the keyhole, and listen to the conversations he carried on’.

Another celebrated historian, Thomas Carlyle, denounced the ‘opening of men’s letters, [as] a practice near of kin to picking men’s pockets’.

So widespread was public antagonism to the infamous practice, that successive governments all but abandoned it until the 1880s, when special measures were required to combat Irish Fenian outrages.  At the same time, every inspection was required to be authorized by a warrant from the Home Secretary, and there appears little evidence that the practice was at all extensively abused.

That draconian measures are required in time of violent unrest or war would be accepted by reasonable people (my great-aunt worked as a censor in the Russian sector during the last War).

However, what is frightening about the present Government’s proposal is its patent lack of justification, when weighed in the balance against the vital necessity of preserving civil liberties, together with the depressing equanimity with which it will be quietly accepted by the Lib-Lab-Con Establishment.

Almost daily we read of such grave erosions of our liberty, with only rare and token protest from the old parties.  There cannot be the slightest doubt that the real intention is to extend interception of the mails to whatever area of private life the Government finds expedient.  Nor is it the least likely that a Conservative Government will rescind the measure, judging by the Party's general lack of concern for liberty.

This Government, and its obedient revenue service, have after all lately been heavily engaged in employing taxpayers’ money to bribe citizens of non-EU states to engage in illegal subversive activities against their own countries.

While the lack of public protest is depressing, it is understandable in view of the extent of increasing Government oppression (much of it reflecting servile obedience to EU rulings).  So much so, that the average citizen has understandably come to regard resistance as futile.

While I would not claim that UKIP is immune to human frailty, ours is the only party seriously committed to returning power to the people through local and national institutions, which will be accorded authority to deny our arrogant Establishment means of indulging the current remorseless move towards bureaucratic tyranny.