Britain is the most heavily monitored nation on earth, with one public CCTV camera for every fourteen people. You would imagine that this would make the process of identifying and stopping street criminals an easy one. And if you watch Torchwood, you know that CCTV cameras are invaluable in our fight against extraterrestrial dangers. Life doesn’t always imitate art, however, and in the real world CCTV cameras have turned out to be a bust. According to the Guardian, only 3% of British street crimes are solved by camera data. The word “fiasco” is being used to describe the results.

Can we please learn from the British example and not turn America into a surveillance society? I’m not at all a libertarian, but I find the idea of blanket government monitoring of our public life creepy as hell.

Now Italy has gone to the right (though Berlusconi is not my first choice in conservative exemplars.) In the mid-April elections, Communists in the Italian Parliament were consigned to the ashbin of electoral history and center-right parties took control of both the national government and the mayorship of Rome.

Are the Brits next? Prime Minister Gordon Brown is inept and destructive, but he isn’t blind. He can’t be comforted by what he sees on the Continent. Recent opinion polls have been unsettling as well, with Brown’s approval rating at 28%.

If Thursday’s elections are any indication, Britain may be the next European country to elect a center-right government. In the London mayor’s race, Labour incumbent “Red Ken” Livingstone lost out to Boris Johnson, a Conservative. Johnson is the first Tory Mayor of London in thirty years. The local election results from around Britain were even more humiliating for Labour. Not only did Labour lose heavily to the Tories — 44% to 24% — but actually finished a percentage point behind those perpetual also-rans, the Liberal Democrats. Four thousand local council seats were up for grabs. Labour lost 331 seats, the Tories picked up 256.

Given Brown’s scuttling of the U.S.-British Special Relationship, let’s hope that his government is the next to fall.

Further Reading:
Paxalles / Right Pundits / Virginia Virtucon

Picture credit: Times (London)

On the other hand, it runs counter to most of the past two decades of history.  Everywhere the trend has been for synthetic nations to dissolve their bonds, replaced by nation-states centered on a single nationality.  The Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia have all fallen apart.  The British Uberkultur is fraying, and its constituent nations are devolving toward independence.  Even Belgium teetered recently on the edge of oblivion. 

 So what to make of the EU?  I think it’s successfully integrating for a couple of reasons.  1.  The process is undemocratic.  None of the political leaders driving the process give a fig about their people’s opinions, so the EU is insulated from the trend toward devolution.  2.  People don’t take the EU seriously as even a quasi-nation.  I have yet to meet a “European.” 

Despite its pretensions, the EU will likely never succeed in inculcating a lasting national identity on its subjects.  Instead, it will remain as another smothering level of bureaucracy accreted upon the creaking Nanny States already afflicting Europe.  Given the faceless, unresponsive nature of the EU bureaucracy, it’s more likely to create Euro-peons than Europeans. . .