Peers and Peepers

Once again, the health of our democracy is shown in its full pox-ridden skeletal horror as the House of Donors reports on New New Labour's surveillance state. Our Mother of Parliaments' upper chamber is unelected, unreliable, out of date and contains Peter Mandelson and a couple of dozen bishops; it is long overdue for reform, and no doubt within a few more years the entrepreneurial, cash-for-legislation process that makes headlines today will have become the normal and acceptable way of doing business. For the moment, however, the House of Donors remains a force of conservatism, pointing out that Britain "leads the world in the use of CCTV, with an estimated 4m cameras", some of which may well work some of the time; and that more than seven per cent of the population has already been entered on the national DNA database, some of it no doubt with a degree of accuracy that might reasonably be designated as relatively considerable. The Vicar of Downing Street's precautions against letting the terrorists change our way of life represent "one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the second world war", according to the report by the cross-party constitution committee, which questions the right of local authorities to mount covert surveillance operations and is even anti-British enough to claim that Agent Smith's pet database might be used for "malign purposes". Heaven knows what possibilities their foul, suspicious, geriatric minds may have conjured up; fortunately Agent Smith is working on a new and even more protective database "tracking everybody's emails, calls, texts and internet use", while the Minister of Profitable Prisons wishes "to lower barriers on the widespread sharing of personal data across the public sector" without going to the trouble of leaving it on public transport.