Government wants to control you, business just wants to flog you stuff. I know which I prefer.

 Rich people running large companies don't want you to be poor. Really they don't. Those people want you to be rich because when you're rich you're going to buy more stuff. And when you buy more stuff, these folk can buy yachts, footballs clubs and space programmes helping make the world still more spiffy than it was before we started.

Some of those rich people run technology companies - the dark evil of Facebook, Google and so forth. We're told (mostly by politicians or by people who know there's more book sales in imaginary demons than in truth) that these big technology companies are bad because of algorithms, machine learning, profiling, psychographics and other scary things we don't really understand. The message of these politicians (and the people with books to sell) is that without some controls these tech companies will become the 21st century's robber barons impoverishing us so they can have more power and money. For the answer I refer you to the first paragraph above - rich businessmen and big businesses are really not interested in you being poor.

So, if the motives of businesses are clear ("we want to make money") how is it that we now have an escalating moral panic about tech? This sort of thing from one futurist person on Twitter - "...and if we don't start now, we will be nothing but pawns of large tech companies."

The thing for me with all of this is that the alternative to us being pawns of large tech companies (who essentially want to flog us goods and services) is to be what exactly? It does seem that those riding the moral panic of techno-fear - a sort of 21st century luddism - are proposing that the power is shifted from those terrible people selling us stuff and folded into the caring, sharing arms of government.

This is the government that wants to tax, ban and regulate you into changing your lifestyle to their official prescription (for your health, to protect, for the children). This is the government that demands identification from you for the most mundane of ordinary activities, from voting or opening a bank account to buying some glue to fix the shelf in the den, This is the government that, without democratic authority, is testing face recognition systems and enhanced surveillance. The government that installs cameras to track your every move and introduces Public Space Orders to give them power to arrest and punish you for things that aren't a crime. And this is the government that's introduced new blasphemy laws - supposedly to combat hate crime - allowing them to police our words and punish us for 'wrongthink'.

You should be a lot more scared of government and its agents than of businesses that just want to sell you stuff. Government exists only for the purpose of power and control - some of that is necessary but most of it suits the tidy organised minds of the bureaucrats (who, of course, know so much better what's good for you that you do). And all wrapped up in the hollow reassurance of "if you've done nothing wrong then you've nothing to fear".

As with all actions of government - and so much of it is beyond the scope of democratic accountability as to be essentially beyond control - you have to imagine these tools of  surveillance and restriction in the hands of a more authoritarian government. And we have a little glimpse of it with places like Singapore (how it makes me mad to see supposedly freedom-loving Tories telling us that South East Asia's pseudo-democratic and authoritarian city state is marvellous) and, of course, the ex-communist autocracy of China which is introducing a Social Credit system straight out of Brian Aldiss's "Primal Urge".

You've a choice folks - live in a free consumer society or else run from the imaginary demons conjured up by the great and good to scare you back under their control. For me this is a simple decision - if the price of freedom is me getting ads with my online searches directing me to things I might like to buy then it's a really cheap deal. And the motive of government, in so far as it is clear at all, has always been to control and direct what you do, the very antithesis of freedom.

“Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.”

Choose freedom.



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The motives of politicians

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It is common for us to question the motivation of those who hold a different view. We are too seldom prepared to accept honest or honourable reasons - whether ideological or practical - for that person to wish to do something we would not do.

And the more passionate our commitment to the cause, the more we are unable to accept that someone simply doesn't agree with us or that this disagreement is principled not cynical or driven by some sort of base motive.

So it is with public service reform. I have read some of the thousands of comments, tweets, facebook posts and carefully crafted infographics that impugn the decisions of government. Rather than, for example, accepting that private sector options in delivering health are used because people believe it will lead to better health outcomes, we get the accusation that ministers do it because of personal gain.

And rather than see that reforming welfare helps make work pay and can improve peoples lives, we're told that those proposing change are uncaring or, worse, are motivated by 'hatred of the poor'. Instead of seeing the point (you're not obliged to agree with it) that the prospect of a life on welfare is something to be discouraged, we're fed stories of how changes are proposed to "punish" the poor or the sick.

There may be the occasional person whose motives are questionable but I don't believe the motives of current ministers are anything but decent and honourable. At least not in policy decisions. Nor for that matter do I think that the motives of ministers in Gordon Brown's government - a tragic train crash of ignominious failure - were anything but decent and honourable. I just think they were wrong.

Too much of our discourse is conducted on the basis of trying to destroy the reputation of decent men and women trying to do what they think is the right thing to do. We poke around at where they went to school, at who they are married to, at their friends and at things they might have done twenty or thirty years ago at university. We make sweeping statements - "Tories don't care", "Labour hates business" - as the basis for our arguments without realising how petty, how shallow and, frankly, how nasty it makes us seem.

You're welcome to point out when I have done this - I'm sure I have - and to suggest on this basis that I am a hypocrite. But in the end, if we are to have a politics that people think worthy of respect, we need to try and deal with policy choices on the assumption that the reasons for doing them are decent and not motivated by venality, greed or base political advantage.

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