All your CCTV are belong to us (aka word to Banksy)

I flew back to London about a month ago. I landed at Gatwick on a rainy evening and decided to go for a quick cigarette before boarding my train back into town. As I stepped out of Gatwick’s terminal into the cold winter air I sparked up and stood to the side, ignoring the big signs that were telling me to move about 200 meters further along to the designated smoking area. No sooner had I lit my cigarette that a recorded message came over the speakers advising me (well there was no one else around) that I wasn’t allowed to smoke outside apart from within the aforementioned designated areas.

The situation’s surrealism hit me straight away. I was back in the country less than 30 minutes and already ‘big brother’ was watching over me, telling me what to do and where to do it. Having lived in Tokyo, where smoking is allowed pretty much everywhere but in the streets, it wasn’t that the order to smoke in a designated area bothered me, in fact the whole thing didn’t really bother me, but the timing of the recorded message (which I’m assuming was triggered by a human considering the freakish timing of the occurence) just made me remember one of the reasons why I left the UK behind 2 years ago.

It’s well documented that England is one of the most surveilled countries in the modern world, with 1 cctv for every 14 people, and added to this fairly freaky statistic is the government’s various moves to try and oversee more and more of people’s daily lives as well as control what is consumed, viewed and watched, from the current debate on monitoring illegal music downloads to throttling torrent users, introducing National IDs, the oyster card, forbidding people to photograph police officers and a strange move to allow the government to supply ISPs with a list of banned sites related to child pornography without any overseeing (can’t find a link to this one at the moment, but the jist was that if they can supply said list without any overseeing, than who’s to say what they are banning).

And without a doubt, out of all the countries I’ve lived in England now feels like the most oppresive in a sense with a definite feel of Big Brother to it that eerily resembles George Orwell’s ’1984.’ Without falling head first into paranoia mode or conspiracy sensationalism, it’s hard to not see certain patterns in England that point towards this. Every country has its fair share of control and the likes, but nowhere has it felt like it does here, and having lived here for 10 years before I left, I also saw and felt it increase over the years.

Which brings the question, why the hell did I come back? Well because of various things, most of which are totally unrelated to any of this. I’m not bitching or moaning or saying ‘oh we’re fucked, quick draw for the aluminium head cap.’ Rather I was reminded of the whole thing by both my freaky voice-over accident at the airport and the sight of Banksy’s now fairly famous painting (above) a few days later. Say what you will about Banksy, but the man knows how to make a point (look closer there’s a cctv camera right next to his piece), and it’s hard not to feel like the UK is heading towards a fairly scary and bleak future, and that’s without blowing things out of proportion.

There are many benefits about living here, and that’s why I came back. One thing I could definitely leave behind at the drop of a hat again though is this overbearing feeling of control and of someone watching you at all times. You learn to ignore it but sooner or later something crops up to remind you. Or an automated message will blast onto the overhead speakers.