One Nation Under CCTV

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

This morning I went to Harrods with Leah, which was an overwhelming experience. It’s just so big and luxurious. We only managed to buy lunch. I think it was all we could afford. We grabbed our food and took the Tube to Marble Arch to meet the Banksy group for their tour.
Banksy is a British street artist whose unique style, political messages, and intriguing anonymity have earned him widespread popularity. He’s kind of like a modern day Robin Hood, providing a voice for people oppressed by those in power, and laughing in the face of authority as he does it. One of his main topics of complaint is CCTV, or Closed Circuit Television, a network of security cameras that keep the majority of the country under constant surveillance. One of the elusive graffiti artist’s largest, most recent, and most famous works is a sixteen foot piece showing a small child in a red coat on a ladder painting the words “ONE NATION UNDER CCTV” while a police officer and his dog watch from the corner. The piece is on a wall just outside of a Royal Mail dispatch center in central London, a gated government building surrounded by security cameras— cameras that, ironically, couldn’t catch Banksy. Here Banksy is both poking fun at the government and the ineffectiveness of CCTV, while trying to alert the public to what he sees as a gross invasion of privacy. But does it work?
In 2002 a paper was written that estimated the number of CCTV cameras in the United Kingdom to be somewhere around 4,200,000, or about one for every fourteen people. Recently, researchers increased that number to one camera for every twelve persons. In London alone, one study estimates that you are on camera approximately three hundred times a day. You might think that there should be some enormous outcry, that British authority is just like Big Brother and that my month in London has been some sort of Orwellian nightmare. Don’t worry. I haven’t been hauled off to the Ministry of Love just yet. There’s been no outcry. In fact, the majority of British people don’t mind it at all.
All over the city there are signs that read “CCTV is watching” and P.A. announcements telling you that “For security purposes, this area is being monitored by CCTV.” The government claims that CCTV is necessary to help reduce the crime rate, an excuse that the public seems to buy into. However, more skeptical minds, like Banksy, fear what such extensive surveillance can do in the wrong hands.
So, all this got me thinking: Would people ever stand for this in the United States? My guess would be no. We are so attached to the idea of privacy and our right to privacy, and we have such an inherent distrust of the government, that the possibility of being on camera for the majority of our day-to-day lives would be an outrageous imposition on our civil liberties.
I remember when we brought up how bizarre we, as Americans, found CCTV, the people at the Cabinet meeting related it back to the American public outcry at government wiretapping. They found it ridiculous that Americans got so up in arms over something that, to a Brit, is routine and even to be expected.
Personally, I have yet to be bothered by it, but that could be because I’m not committing any crimes or planning to cause some sort of public disturbance that needs to be documented for security purposes. Or, as Banksy would argue, maybe I’m just jaded like the rest of Londoners and I need to be reminded by a sixteen foot graffiti painting. Either way, you can’t argue. The man certainly knows how to get a point across.

The group got some wine to celebrate the project being over. We all had a bit and got ready to see Billy Elliot. The show was good, but not great, and it will NEVER work in the U.S. I know it’s supposed to open on Broadway soon, but I think it’s too uniquely British. Aside from the slang, there’s the political history of Maggie Thatcher and the Mining Strike which Americans might not know. There are also the class issues, which are far more pronounced in the UK than they are at home, and the regional conflicts. It was simple enough to figure out, but the full gravity of the “backward” northerners against the “posh” Londoners might not make as much of an impact on an American audience as it does in the UK. I’ll be interested to see how it’s received on Broadway.
I was planning to go clubbing tonight with the Banksy group, but I got too tired...yet again. So I came back to do journals.

Tomorrow, though is our last day in London. I can hardly believe it. I’ve got the Milton Evensong in the evening, and then…Norwich!