Today’s revelation that the police in the UK, with the connivance of the Home Office, are planning to launch spy drones over Britain for covert surveillance from the sky is only the latest, but perhaps the most far-reaching, measure yet of the Government’s obsessive drive for all-round comprehensive spying on its citizens. According to its authors, Kent police and BAE, civilian UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) would “greatly extend” the Government’s surveillance and “revolutionise policing”. That must be the under-statement of the year. This is pure Orwell. We are told that these spies in the sky could operate from 20,000ft (two-thirds as high as Mt. Everest) and would thus be invisible from the ground, and be in continuous operation for 15 hours at a time. This is so all-embracing, like a permanent unsleeping eye watching you ceaselessly, that it can only be described as totalitarian in the untrammelled range of its application.

What is its motive? Here one can only suspicious. The original claim – that it was a device to monitor shipping in the Channel and detect immigrants on their way from France – is risible (not least because most illegal immigrants use the Channel ?Tunnel or come in by air). However this cock-and-bull story was soon exposed as a PR stunt to play down the civil liberties implications. It is now being admitted that it could have “routine” application in checking out anti-social motorists, tractor thieves, fly-tippers, cash machine fiddlers, railway loiterers, trouble-makers at social functions, and (ominously) protesters, to name but a few targets in a very long list.
While apprehending offenders is a necessary function in a free society that all honest persons will support, the sheer unregulated scale of this exercise goes far beyond an acceptable balance between crime detection and privacy protection and breaches the fundamental right to individual freedom which it allegedly purports to uphold. Significantly, it has only been disclosed as a result of a Guardian FOI investigation, not openly reported to Parliament in a Ministerial statement. Maybe also significantly, it has just come to light exactly at the time when we are all being warned that the level of alert is being raised “from substantial to severe”, implying that an attack was “very likely”. No doubt the spooks thought that this was, as we were once told, a good time to release bad news which would not otherwise be tolerated.

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