From Free Life No. 22, April 1995.

Several of my readers have noticed a tendency to pessimism in these Editorials. One has even complained. Though it is perhaps unwise for an Editor to pay too close an attention to his readers, I think it will be useful on this occasion to reply.

It is, I think, plain that the "Thatcher Revolution" has been a failure. For all they promised then and boast now, the Conservatives have entirely failed since 1979 to "roll back the frontiers of the State". They have instead rolled them forward at higher speed. They have increased the overall burden of taxes. They have laid a mountain of new regulations on business. Their criminal laws are horrible or absurd or both. They have turned bank officials into police informers, and are threatening us with identity cards. They have welcomed a ban on nipple- piercing, and have actually made a law against "repetitive beats".

Of course, it was not intended that we should be loaded with all the machinery of a police state. No one actually wanted privatisation to throw up a set of monster corporations, with duties of surveillance and arbitrary punishment given in exchange for commercial privileges. Nor did anyone want local government reform to smash patterns of autonomy that had come down to us in their essentials from Anglo-Saxon times. But that is how these very sensible policies turned out when applied in the debased moral climate of our age - a climate in which it is the unexamined belief of millions that state should stand to citizen as parent stands to child.

And when I look ahead, I see still worse. We live at the opening of what could so easily be a golden age. It should soon be possible to extend our lives to centuries or even millennia, and to give us just about every material comfort we can imagine. But these hopes of a better future often seem pointless. Far more likely, the technology now being developed will be used to give us all the freedom and privacy of exhibits in a zoo.

Here, then, is my reason for pessimism. Violence aside, there have been two means open to us of avoiding a collapse into despotism. At its best, the Thatcherite programme was to enlist majority support for single items, and thereby bring about a transformation that would not in itself have gained enough support. The Libertarian Alliance programme has been to wage a propaganda war across several generations, that will eventually convert the intellectual ‚lites from which the majority takes its ideas.

As said, the first of these has failed already; and I see no present chance that it will be tried again with greater persistence and sophistication. The second requires more heroes than will exist in an age of smart cards and unlimited data bases.

All this being said, however, I see reason only for pessimism, not yet for despair. The Internet remains open, far beyond the control of authority; and the rapid movement through it of news and ideas is for the moment guaranteed by encryption programs that cannot by present means be broken. Already, this fact is working a quiet revolution. As the Internet expands, increasing millions are gaining access to information that could once only have been published by obscure pamphleteers for the eyes of a few hundred. Take for example, Mr Furlong's article on the next page, "A Second American Revolution?". A draft version, distributed last week on the Internet, has already been read by 200,000 people; and no newspaper with a circulation this size would even consider publishing it. Thatcherism may for now have failed, but the LA programme is still moving ahead unchecked.

Even so, this respite lies less in the nature of the new technology than in the ignorance of our authorities. Everyone, from journalists to police chiefs and purity crusaders, is lamenting the freedom of the Internet; and is fabricating lurid tales of the child pornography and drug recipes that waft unbidden through the cheapest modem. But these are people who have still to learn how to set a video timer. Another generation, and controls on the Internet may have us nostalgic about the security of sealed letters sent through the Post Office.

But a generation may be enough. Perhaps the contest is more balanced than I normally assume. But while it may too early to cry "all hope abandon", I still suspect that bad times are just around the corner.

Sean Gabb