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Am I the only person worried about the insidious rise of the Big Brother state?
Tomorrow a Bill will be published, to be rushed through Parliament, allowing Government agencies to swap personal information on every citizen of this land. MPs are apparently going to be denied a full vote on the proposed data sharing! Worst still, there is going to be no control over the thousands of civil servants who will have access to this information. So someone working at DVLA in Swansea can find out all about the medical history of an old school friend now living in Scarborough. Even the Council of Europe's commissioner on human rights believes this country has gone too far in creating a "surveillance society". The old argument that those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear does not rub with him. After all, we are presumed innocent until found guilty - the key principle of criminal law.
With the Government's appalling record on personal data loss, this latest stealth tactic does not bode well for you and me. Unrestricted data sharing is simply not on and the sooner the average citizen wakes up to what is going on quietly around them the better. We are fast losing our right to claim we live in a truly democratic society.
Meanwhile, Government blunders on with the announcement of yet another major inquiry, this time into the state of our major road networks. The Commons Transport Committee has been charged with considering current and future road demand. Well I can tell them for free that motorway traffic has risen by a third since 1990 and forecasts predict a possible 82% growth in motorway traffic by 2025. So the Committee had better get its skates on before we all grind to a halt in the most massive gridlock imaginable. If the statistical forecasts are to be believed, it has just 16 years to get things sorted, and counting.
I just hope that this Committee has the wider remit of coming up with a totally integrated transport policy. It's what we all know is required but nobody seems to be taking the issue seriously enough. Platitudes to looking at "alternative strategies" and "taking account of climate change" are not enough. We need firm action and sooner rather than later. We are already in serious danger of missing our CO2 carbon emission cutting targets. Less of the hot air Government, and more concrete action! What we need is an integrated transport network, not an unsupervised, unchecked data-sharing network.
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