William Heath’s blog

Posted on May 27th by William in Creative outlets, Faith & practice, IdealGov stuff

Here’s a final draft article I’ve done for a Quaker booklet on civil liberties. Very grateful for comments while there’s still time.

There must be something about the Quaker determination to focus on injustice and do something constructive and compassionate about it which accounts for the Society’s extraordinary record on social justice and civil liberties. I am still only now learning about the scope and detail of that history, but every week I meet plain-speaking Quakers with a good-natured and resilient self-confidence who are linked to extraordinary achievements. One might be a former ambulance driver from the Russo-Finnish war, another a campaigner for the accountability of US military bases. As I write, a local Friend is on the receiving end of Israeli bombardment as a peace witness in Israel-Palestine.

They are all hardcore pacifists, long term environmentalists, advocates of simple living. And they are generally supportive of other faiths and keen to learn from them.

One thing that has been bugging me for longer than I’ve been a Quaker is the need to shed some light on the whole matter of computerisation of the state, or government’s role in the emergence of an information society. I spent 18 years trying to research, understand, write and speak about government IT, but the more I understood what was being spent and how it was being implemented, the greater grounds for concern I saw.

Things like IT project failures, and more recently extensive losses of personal data by public authorities, are generally seen as issues of competence. But I think the problem lies deeper: in the intention. It’s not that the computers won’t work (although there is a long history of failed projects). It’s that people are naively turning to machines in ways that attack our civil liberties and avoid tackling the real, human problems.

We spend £16bn a year computerising public services, but we have never been asked what we want. The people this is meant to help were never involved in the process of specifying, designing, buying and managing these systems by which we are increasingly defined and judged.

We’ve got vast central databases of children, pupils, taxpayers, drivers, immigrants, offenders and those on welfare. We’ve got the most extensive CCTV surveillance in the world. Now we’re proposing to routinely keep a central record of every email address, web address and phone number used, when and where. We’re creating a world in which rules-based systems determine how we treat each other, who has access to what services and where the lines of discrimination should be drawn.

Quakers maintain that each person is unique, precious, a child of God. The government uses “Every Child Matters” as a slogan for setting up databases which will make intimate details of 11m children available to several hundred thousand public servants. But some people felt to be at risk of leaks (such as the children of celebrities and politicians) can have their records “screened”.  

You have to ask: is this the best way to treat each other?

Professionally I found myself earning a decent living but with serious doubts about whether our efforts were going to contribute to the sort of world I wanted to live in, or in which we would all participate actively and constructively. My clients – many of them more than likeable as individuals – behaved corporately as one expected. They were in it for the profits. Considerations of human dignity did not feature. Many were primarily military contractors, with a corporate culture which reflected that. One organisation appears to have been involved in abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and subsequent intimidation of journalists reporting the matter, but it never stopped selling statistical services to UK local government.

Government’s IT suppliers prefer a process which exaggerates branded threats in the “war on terror” (or on any one of many other abstract nouns) and then sells off-the-shelf “solutions” to them. And this became the spirit in which our identity card schemes, census, phone interception, number-plate recognition and DNA recording, health and children’s records were to be designed and introduced.

When this sort of stuff is weighing on your mind, the process of the Quaker Meeting, and the collected insights of the Society through the centuries, are very helpful. A Meeting for Worship is a great place to get clearer in your head about such difficult matters. The silence is deeper and more powerful than one can imagine. You can go to a Quaker Meeting feeling complicated, confused, angry and frustrated about how to make sense of and deal with the rest of the world and where to put your energy. You come away clearer, refreshed, full of energy and humour.

Quakers are exceptionally clear and supportive over matters of conscience which might bring you into conflict with the state. Their process tests and challenges you in your local Meeting. But if it passes the test, they back you wholeheartedly, as examples all round the country today will attest.

The Quaker history of practical progress on human rights, equality, the slave trade, prison reform and business ethics gives a wonderful sense of momentum and perspective as we face up to big issues today. It makes me confident that collectively, with the same sort of calm clarity and peaceful force of will that has already worked so well, we can make progress on ending our blind acceptance of the arms trade and tendency towards war. We can live sustainably and within our means.

The Quaker advice that “a simple lifestyle freely chosen is a source of strength” speaks volumes. Indeed the tiny pamphlet Advices and Queries, which distils 350 years-worth of insight into eleven pages of plain talk, cannot be recommended too highly for what it says about relationship difficulties, drugs and alcohol, global stewardship or interfaith relations.

We still have to solve the problem of the database state, of course. But, given what’s been solved already, we have to believe that with the right frame of mind and the right support, it’s going to be within our power to do it.

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