Blog 3 - 1984 anyone?

Blog 3 - 1984 anyone?


I'm increasingly frustrated and saddened at societies aquiesence into fear. Not fear of terrorism, paedophiles or them there immigunts that the Daily Mail would prefer us to be quaking in our stout British loafers at. The fear I'm talking about is far more insidious and disturbing, mainly because the moral minority seem to be getting the rest of us to accept it's validity. I'm talking about the fear of thoughts.

Over the last couple of days Lord Triesmann has been forced to resign from his positions as Chairman of the F.A. and Chairman of England's World Cup Bid following comments he made about the Spanish and Russian F.A.'s rumoured attempts to bribe referees. On the face of it he seems bang to rights. Ridiculous thing to suggest, can only hinder the work he's trying to achieve and hurt our country. And considering I've always thought Triesmann a liability as head of the bid, I was just happy to see the back of him initially.

However, the context is the key to this story. Triesmann was not making these remarks publically. He was doing so at what he thought was a relaxed lunch chat with his former P.A. ; a young woman who claims he was also her lover for six months. So he did what we all do at lunch with "friends": we chat, we talk about people we know, about common interests which would have included work, and goddammit we have a good gossip. The problem Triesmann faced is that he trusted someone he knew and never for a second thought that she would be secretly taping their conversation before flogging her grubby shameful little sneak recording to the Mail. Triesmann never broke a law, he never lied, he never made a public statement. He said he'd heard rumours that Spain and Russia were looking to bribe referees in the World Cup. In private. To a friend. As a major player in European and World Football it's his job to know about rumours such as these, whether there is any substance in them or not.

Now I can understand why this has put him in an awkward position and made his position untenable in the current media climate. However, my point is why? Who cares what Triesman says or thinks in private? If he manages the bid correctly and does his job, who cares if he's a racist, a sado-masochist or a transvestite when he's off-duty? I say loads of things to friends that I wouldn't neccesarily want to have broadcast on Facebook. The difference is that the bloody stupid Mail paid this woman her 40 pieces of silver for a bit of cheap dinnertable chatter. The rule would seem to be that anybody in the public eye cannot have thoughts of their own or talk about anything unless it's cast iron fact. God knows what would have happened if they'd discussed the Kennedy Assassination. Presumably the Warren Commission would have had to have been recalled.

Example no 2 is the poor sod who lost his job and gained a criminal record for making a joke on Twitter. Paul Chambers, a normal everyman accountant had been chatting up someone he'd met on Twitter. Eventually, after much cyber-persuasion he managed to get the object of his desire to agree to meet up. God knows where she was from but the destination of their first meeting was to be his local airport as she arrived on their metallic bird of love from parts unknown. However with the ash cloud issues cropping up the week before, the hapless Chambers makes the pronouncement on Twitter "Airport shut down - Right, you've got 10 days to sort this shit out or I'll come down there and blow the place sky high!"

Somehow Chambers Twitter, which would have only been visible to his friends and anyone who had signed up to receive his tweets, was passed on to the Head of Security at the airport who subsequently passed it on to the police. Next thing you know, Chambers has been arrested, hauled up in court, charged with threatening public safety and fined £1000, before seeing his employers publically sack him as a result. What the hell???!!!

Did they really think that Chambers was a particularly publicity-friendly member of Al Qaeda? I don't remember Osama Bin Laden popping onto Facebook on September 10th saying "Planning a big bash tomoz lol". It's ridiculous. Nobody, not one adult human in the English speaking world can have actually taken that as a genuine threat to security, yet our judicial system has treated this man like a genuine terrorist. He meant no harm to anyone but has been criminalised, fined and then subsequently sacked from his job, and for what? A joke that any number of us could have made without a seconds thought and which meant nothing to anyone save a few pompous pedants with the power to prosecute and the lack of common sense that ensures that they should never be given the reponsibility in the first place.

What can you say, either publically or privately now? What can you think? And what's next? Any bloke with an ounce of honesty will tell you that during an odyssey through the land of free porn that is the internet that there are occasions when during normal, ahem, research that you discover the links you're following have edged towards the more "fringe" elements of acceptable taste. And at this point, I think any of us will agree you realize that there are links there that a) you probably don't want to click on for reasons of general taste, but b) you definitely mustn't click on for fear of who may be monitoring it. Now at this moment in time I don't think (although I'm not 100% certain because I've never tested my supposition believe it or not) that you would be hauled off by the rozzers for clicking on HorseShaggers.Com, SnuffFiles.Web or similar. But there are any number of police operations in place aimed at catching Internet paedophiles and the availability of accessing these sites and others like them is terrifyingly easy. We're frighteningly close to a situation where one wrong click could see you in serious, life-changing trouble.

And those are the margins we are dealing with now. One wrong click. One throwaway remark. One comment in private. You would hope that the powers that be would have the common sense and testicular fortitude to see these things in the context they are actually presented in, but when the Mail buys a taped lunch conversation between friends discussing vague rumours and sees fit to publish it, or when the Crown prosecutes a guy and ruins his life for a run of the mill comment, you have to be scared for that moment which we all have when we put our foot in it inadvertantly, and hope the repercussions remain in proportion.

Anyway, I've said my piece and I'm off to get some dinner. I could murder an Indian...

AH