Peter Hitchens: “The week they sowed the seeds of a British secret police”
tagged abortion, BBC, Britain, Canada, Chesterton, condom, HRC, human rights commissions, Peter Hitchens, police state and secret police
What bothers me just as much is the sense of being transported, when I wasn’t looking, into a very bad dream from which there is no waking up.
When exactly did it happen? When did my town hall change from being a friendly, efficient place into a headquarters of fussy political correctness where I feel like an unwanted interloper?
When did the BBC news become a shameless propaganda show, instead of a discreet one?
When did my GP surgery start asking me for my ethnic origin? Worse, when did they start treating parents as guilty suspects if they bring a child into hospital after a fall?
When did it become impossible ever to speak to anyone who will take responsibility for anything?
When did I start getting the feeling, as one of these episodes begins, that there is absolutely no point in complaining or resisting, because if I don’t accept this, sooner or later, ’security’ is going to be called and I will be worse off than I was before.
It was not always like this. I know it wasn’t. I can remember when it wasn’t. What I cannot remember is, at any stage, asking for the changes that have happened, or being asked if I wanted them.
They just happened, and now they’re here.
Canada is not all that far behind Britain in becoming a police state in all ways except for the actual establishment of a secret police. Our human rights commissions already censor opinions held to be “disagreeable” while at the same time serving as a vehicle of agenda and propaganda for subversive interests. Bureaucratic record-keeping is certainly monolithic enough in this country as to make the issue of a person’s ethnic origin a suitable topic for a medical form (when in reality, all that should matter is a) whether one is injured or ill and b) if so, in what way). And the dichotomy that has emerged between parental rights on one hand, and the whims of educators and health facilitators on the other, is well known here. But then, we opened that Pandora’s Box when we started giving fourteen-year old girls the option of getting an abortion, or a supply of condoms, without having to first seek parental consent, didn’t we?
Chesterton observed that if anarchists sought to throw down the small laws, they would be left with big laws instead, a none-too-subtle reminder that when one dismantles the pillars of a functional and free Western government, the result is not a governance-free anarchist paradise, but a dictatorship.
Analogous to Chesterton’s observation is the fact that if human rights commissions would seek to protect, at any cost, the human rights of every petty interest group that dares speak out, they will not be left with a paradise in which every person walks about in an optimal, self-actualized and enlightened appreciation of his or her own rights; they will be left with a place in which no person enjoys any basic rights at all. The police state loometh, in Canada as surely as in Britain.
Update: Welcome, Steynians!
