The Big Society
Is this just a euphemism for a privatised “Big Brother”?
Whilst I was happy to read of the demise of the national child database, as a sign that perhaps the coalition was earnest in its desires to sweep away illiberal poorly designed citizen databases, I was not amused to read about David Cameron’s ideas to use private companies to spy on the unemployed or the disabled.
Experian and Equifax have their place to help us build a credit history and provide banks and other financial institutions with the risk assessments necessary for making lending decisions, but there is no moral advantage in being used by the government to spy upon its citizens. The whole idea is repugnant and ought to be dropped as fast as possible. The “Big Society” is likely to very quickly become a privatised “Big Brother” with measures such as this which appear to have been filched from some old 1960s East German manual.
This is not what I would call a libertarian idea that a Conservative or a Liberal could proudly advocate.
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