Quo Imus.

There’s an organisation in the UK called Palestine Action, formed to protest at the treatment of Palestinians in Palestine. In a purportedly democratic country, that’s a perfectly legitimate thing to do. Ah, but…

Some of their supporters recently broke into an RAF base and sprayed red paint on an aeroplane, Oh dear, now we’re into serious stuff – far more serious than troops killing innocent civilians queuing for food or water at an aid centre. These ne’er-do-well protesting types are now guilty of two serious crimes: being in a place where the government says they mustn’t go (and thus ‘putting the security of the nation at risk’; you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?) and vandalising an expensive piece of equipment. So the organisation can now be seen as being in the business of encouraging criminal behaviour. But let’s not call it ‘criminal behaviour’ say the politicians, let’s call it ‘terrorism’, and then we can make it illegal to belong to the organisation or even show support for it. (Should one laugh or cry at this attitude? It’s difficult know, isn’t it?

Unsurprisingly, a series of protests was held to object to the proscribing of the organisation, action which, in itself, is considered to be supportive and therefore defined as criminal behaviour… The police turned out in force and arrested over a hundred of them. And so I ask again:

Where are we going?

Meanwhile, the government has enacted another law making it illegal for people to show interest in violent activity, even though they haven’t yet actually planned any, much less carried it out. ‘This,’ say the politicians, ‘will catch the offenders before they can do any harm. That’s good, yes?’ Well, that view has at least an element of logic behind it, but how far is it reasonable to go in taking people out of society before they’ve done anything wrong? (The maximum sentence for showing an interest is life imprisonment, by the way.) It reminds me of another idea which was aired recently – the compulsory mapping of everyone’s genome so that any proclivity towards criminal behaviour can be spotted in advance and people can be locked up before they’ve committed any crime. Is there a difference? I find myself asking again and again:

Where are we going?