Our increasingly fascist government has plumbed new depths with this image:

(Click the image to see the text a little larger)

It is now illegal to take a picture of a police officer if he decides it’s illegal. A little while ago they suggested that people should report their neighbours if they appeared to be living beyond their means and now they are asking people to report their peers for taking innocent photos.

How long before a racist utterance is met with “Let an experienced officer decide what action to take”? How long before your freedom on the street is entirely at the whim of another human being?

A friend of mine asked me the other day, apparently not sarcastically, whether it was legal to take a picture of another person. How far down the road are we where this could even be thought of as a possibility? Taking a photo does no-one any harm and what use are laws that don’t protect anyone? Actually, that’s the wrong question; we should not ask what use a law has that does not protect, rather we should be asking whether a law that does not protect anyone is a just law or an unjust intrusion on self.

I am conscious that this post will not excite the masses — there is nothing in these developments that could not be argued as being in the interest of the majority — but that is true of almost all the steps the state must take between now and Nineteen Eighty Four. Really.

Obviously good people must help the State protect other people from bad people, but when good people act for the State in reporting innocent people on a hunch, well then we’re on a slippery slope.