Is the UK becoming the new Stasi state?

Photograph of Rowan © Valerie Pezeron

Are we moving towards a Stasi state? This is the question I asked myself last Friday when I met with my friend Rowan. Rowan is a 35year-old part-time graphic designer and part-time arts student in London. He loves cycling, animation and design and his girlfriend, the lovely Denise. He also happens to be of part Iranian ancestry, is born in this country and is a UK citizen. He is free-spirited, is not a religious person, is faithful in friendship and pretty laid-back dude; he goes about his day without minding anyone else’s business but his own. His motto could be “Live and let live”. But that is exactly what was denied him a few weeks ago.

Photograph of Rowan and girlfriend Denise © Valerie Pezeron

For those of you with sensitive souls, be warned that this story has shades of the Menezes debacle about it. Rowan was in a café with a friend of his having a coffee when the police arrested him. Leaving the coffee-shop, poor old Rowan saw several police cars and vans skidding to a halt next to him and he found himself surrounded by several police officers, strip searched right there and then on the sidewalk and then manhandled into a police van. Nobody read him his rights before he was subjected to a very long and rather forceful interrogation. He was then thrown without explanation into a cell. He was only released much later after his friend vouched for him and pleaded with the police that our friend was no threat to humanity…. without even an apology or a word. But they have now on file his fingerprints, his mobile tracking number, his entire profile filed away in their huge data library. We are talking that same library that the EU has deemed against the EU constitution or International Human Rights and ordered the home office to erase...

Photograph of Rowan © Valerie Pezeron

What are they doing still building it up? Don’t they have anything better to do than to hound regular UK citizens? Those anti-terror laws were never created to abuse common people. It was a tool to fight terrorists, now they are piling files and spying on everybody and anybody. This smacks of the Stasi German state that was allowed to terrorise its own people for decades in the name of inland security. The Stasi was the official state security service of East Germany. Headquartered in East Berlin, It was one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies in the world. Between 1950 and 1989, the Stasi employed a total of 274,000 persons in an effort to root out the 'class enemy'. The Ministry of State Security aka MFS infiltrated almost every aspect of GDR life; Stasi efforts with one agent per 166 citizens dwarfed, for example, the Nazi Gestapo, which employed only 40,000 officials to watch a population of 80 million (one officer per 2,000 citizens) and the Soviet KGB, which employed 480,000 full time agents to oversee a nation of 280 million residents (one agent per 583 citizens). When informants were included, the Stasi had one spy per 66 citizens of East Germany. When part-time informer adults were included, the figures reach approximately one spy per 6.5 citizens.

Mielke and MFS officers © Wikipedia

I know now Rowan is engaged in a fight to clear his name and for his data to be erased. He wasn’t charged of anything, yet the police go around like far-west cowboys plucking people off the streets without justification. He is considering all other options open to him such as contacting his local MP, writing to the MET chief and speaking to the press. Well, I am part of the press and if I hope this article will raise the profile of the ever-increasing threat of police malpractices, and the fact that we are moving towards a scary CCTV nation with dwindling basic and fundamental freedoms. That same freedom that makes Gordon Brown call the West a group of Democratic states and justifies waging war on others less prone be so...I love this country and I want it to remain a great country. History has shown we should not be lulled into a false sense of security and assume our rights will remain untouched ad vitam eternam; Germany of the Weimacht became Nazi in just a few very short years. And who knew in Zimbabwe of the 70s that this gorgeous country would fall into chaos. Certainly not Stevie Wonder who sang about going there with such glee and hope.