We forgathered in St Michael’s Church in Linlithgow yesterday at 3.00 pm, The Antonine Ensemble, to rehearse for an evening concert. Just at the downbeat, all hell broke loose with a series of stereophonic caterwauling wails echoing around the vast spaces of the kirk. It was another dress rehearsal – for a putative national emergency. All the phones had gone off, including the “phasers on stun”. Not mine. I’d deliberately switched mine off and left it in the car. This was not of itself an act of non-compliance, but just my routine. I never take my phone into concerts, even in switched off mode, for I just don’t trust it. And I switch it off when I’m in a restaurant, and indeed at every social gathering. I just have no desire to be connected. I have no desire to fact-check something on the net halfway through my soup course, or to review my holiday snaps. “Snaps”. There’s a word. Alan Bennett might use it.
But I have to admit, even had I not been in company, I would have switched the damn thing off. Just to be egregious, literally e grex, out of the herd. I do not wish to be herded. I do not wish “the authorities” to inform me, at least electronically, that I am in imminent danger of fire, flood, plague, pestilence, or terrorist attack. It strikes me that this latest government wheeze is all part of a hidden agenda to inure us to the fact that we have all yet again donned khaki, and we must be ready to repel the invader. A pox on their app.
A decade ago, even a year or two ago, I would have written that without a care in the world. But now I am conscious that putting something like that out into the public domain is not without its risks. Maybe I’m contravening some public order legislation. Incitement to non-compliance, or something. It’s hard to ignore the fact that the UK is gradually becoming more authoritarian. We’re all going to carry ID cards. Actually I have no particular objection to ID cards, because as a matter of fact – I’ve just conducted a quick inventory – I already have 19 of them in my wallet, not counting my Ground coffee loyalty card (other baristas are available). What I object to is that apparently I have to have the ID on my phone. It’s all a part of this gradual slide into a state of Total Digitalisation. One’s presence in the Cloud is mandatory. There is no escape from the catastrophic dystopia we have already created.
The fact that, yesterday at 3.00, even the mobiles on silent mode emitted a siren, is highly significant. Winston Smith could turn the volume down on his telescreen, but he could not switch the device off. There followed an explanation, given in emollient tones, that this was merely, on this occasion, a drill. Who dreams up stuff like this?
You make think I’m a Luddite, but actually I carried my first mobile phone in 1987. It was the size of a brick, and resembled a walkie-talkie John Wayne might have used on Juno, or Omaha. The battery was the size of a car battery. I used it in New Zealand when I was on call to provide a liaison between Middlemore Hospital in South Auckland, and Auckland International Airport. So I know a little about disaster preparedness. There were three levels of call-out. The first was purely advisory, and reported a potential hazard. For example, an incoming 747 had shut down one if its four engines, a surprisingly common occurrence. The second level indicated a more serious threat, and demanded my presence at the airport. The assembly point was at a perimeter fence, near the Domestic Terminal, bearing the sign “Don’t park here ever”. There I would park, and wait, with the emergency services, hopefully to be stood down. We gathered there routinely when there was “purple airspace”, that is, when a Royal was flying in. Why that specifically constituted a hazard I have no idea. Maybe the Royal was at the controls. The skies were cleared. The traffic due for departure was kept on the ground. Pilots, say, from American Airlines would call up the tower and ask, “What’s the problem?” – knowing perfectly well what the delay was due to, and no doubt wishing to cause a little discomfort.
The third and final echelon of call-out was, of course, for a crash. In my ten years of undertaking this job, that only occurred once. A freight plane on a night flight out of Auckland crashed in the Manukau Harbour, and I spent the night out on a boat while the frogmen dived where the aircraft wreckage was floating. I had the melancholy task of declaring one of the two pilots deceased. I remember that apart from a gash across the front of her shin, there wasn’t a mark on her body.
Shortly after this, I was sitting on a committee in Middlemore tasked with revising the hospital Disaster Plan. I was very conscious that at the time it was very underdeveloped. One of the managers prepared a report suggesting that we were in a high state of readiness. I pointed out that in fact the report depicted a scenario that was entirely divorced from reality. But the report was ratified. I think this was the first time that I came across the phenomenon of politicians (in the widest sense), managers, committee members, members of think tanks, Quangos, people in various ways divorced from the “coal face”, who would construct a plan, often in the form of an algorithm, which had no relationship to reality.
This is why it is no damaging that so many of our politicians have attended elite schools, elite universities, and entered upon a research fellowship, sponsored by a political party, never once having suffered life’s vicissitudes, as they are suffered by the disadvantaged. There was, was there not, an air of farce about last week’s latest “Cabinet Reshuffle”. You go to bed one night as incumbent of one of the great offices of state, and you wake up in the morning as incumbent of another. I have no confidence that the incumbents within the Westminster Bubble can recognise what a disaster is, let alone respond to it.
jamescalumcampbell 