Britain takes a turn for the worse
Yesterday, I received two rather shocking missives. One came from a lady I’ve never met who had been sent hate mail by the Rolf Harris apologist Lizzie Cornish and the other came from the Chelsea nightclub Maggie’s. Both left me despairing of what Britain has become.
The correspondence concerning Cornish indicated nothing other than that this tawdry woman will stoop lower than a sewage pipe in her endeavours to blacken the names of anyone who dares to suggest that the paedophile Harris’ sentence was anything other than deserved, but the message from Maggie’s provided evidence of something far worse: The end of freedom and the end of privacy.
Two stories to keep beside you
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In the email, Dan Watson of Maggie’s remarked: “The RBKC council are now ensuring that all late-night venues in the borough ask every customer for identification on entry to the premises”. This truly is an unacceptable invasion of privacy and it is something that must be stopped. Never has Nineteen Eighty-Four been closer.
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Readers have their say
7 comments
What do they mean by late-night? Only nightclubs or late bar openings. What constitutes late-night. What about 24hr culture? Upon what basis do they require ID information anyhow. It is an invasion of privacy for the grown-ups in a nanny state!
‘It is a major part of London life. It is estimated that around 500,000 young people regularly go ‘clubbing’ in London on a Saturday night. This is more than all the people who visit all of London’s ‘top ten’ visitor attractions combined in a week’…taken from their website.
I don’t like nanny statehood in which ever form it makes and appearance but we have to analyse our cultures turning international due to wi-fi and smartphone etc.,etc…some can have their cake and eat it and some cannot.
Alas, that’s the way of civilisation. If we want to keep the freedoms we and our ancestors had, you’d have to stop
So called progress . ‘I want that now! Or yesterday! If she’s (he’s) got it, I want one too, never mind where the money’s coming from’ (the economy today. Was wreaked not just by the banks but by all of us with all these demands). We are now in a high. Tech environment, our opponent are called Isis (sic). Our own kids of both ages are going to their side- because they see us as corrupt. What else do we expect? Very, very soon you’ll all be asked to have a chip implanted in our bodies and the lose of privacy is nothing but a joke when I hear it said today. Since 2001 we have lost that. Privilege of knowing that when we speak to our mum, it is only a conversation with our mums. Think about it. We are part of the whole conundrum that is this society we live in.
What was anathema and wrong yesteryear is absolute the way you want to live. So don’t blame it all on our government. They are trying their best with a lot of automatons that clever in one thing. War. Go figure…
Alex
If these young people are joining an organsiation that tortures people to death, in the most sadistic of ways, because they see us as “corrupt’ then I venture to suggest they are very, very thick
It’s the way things are going isn’t it. With terrorism becoming a more and more real threat every day we will have to be monitored more and more as a result. Strangely enough there are people who still think we should bow down to these monsters because they’re lovely people, just misunderstood…
I would have thought K&C were very low on crime related problems anyhow with late-night venues. https://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/are-nightclubs-breaking-data-laws-by-storing-your-ids-and-fingerprints
National ID cards were rejected with vehemence by the public, but we’re getting used to something similar without even realising it. Biometric and ID data-harvesting is by no means exclusive to clubs; the tracking and monitoring of our every movement is becoming entrenched in daily life.
“It’s ironic,” says Alan Miller, who recently closed down his bar on Brick Lane under siege from prison-level security requirements by licensing committees. “On the one hand, the public are all being treated as potential criminals; on the other hand, the same public are compliantly handing over their IDs and fingerprints.”
With no public consultation on the issue and a lack of clear national protocol on how information is gathered, stored and used, it’s tragic that we’d also allow our nightlife to come under this level of surveillance. Of course, violence or harassment shouldn’t be tolerated anywhere, but most youth movements have come heavily dusted with a certain amount of bad behaviour. Sanitisation is a death knell to creativity.
An extensive database of highly sensitive information is now in the hands of nightclub owners and the private tech companies that do very nicely from this outsourcing of police work. No one knows what uses this data might one day have, but, as you stand in line waiting to be searched, fingerprinted and data-harvested on your way into a club, it’s worth asking yourself who the real winners and losers might be in all this.
Enjoy your Friday night.
Still outraged at the above! As the public we do not know and have no control over where our data ends up. What about data protection? What if the club owners are being paid to then outsource info on black market to hawk around to god knows who to buy our IDs!! Really annoying. It will kill the vibe of going to nightclubs and late-night venues.
Not sure understand the arguments about rendering your ID to a club entrance employee. Are you not flashing the card? How does the Night Club collect data from this presentation of an ID?