This coming Sunday, 23rd April, is St George’s Day *. It’s also the anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth (and death. What perfect symmetry it is to die on your birthday). The London Marathon is taking place, as is the FA Cup Semi-Final between Brighton & Hove Albion and Manchester United, and at 3pm, a UK-wide test of an emergency alert system will make every mobile phone that is switched on (even if in silent mode) sound an alarm and vibrate.
Perhaps you haven’t heard about it and are going to get the
surprise of your life on Sunday when your phone (and the phones of everyone in
the vicinity) suddenly starts emitting a repeated siren that only goes away
when acknowledged.[1] You
may be aware that it’s going to happen but will still be taken by surprise
because you lose track of the time, or perhaps you won’t get the alert because you’ve turned the notification off or intend
turning your phone off to avoid being interrupted.
Jacob Rees-Mogg said in a party political broadcast
monologue on GB News that I caught on Twitter, that government should not be
indulging in this type of thing, and confesses that he has disabled the
notifications on his phone, which is even more surprising than the news that he
has a phone capable of receiving such alerts in the first place.
Sunday will be a test, but the government website, www.gov.uk/alerts, suggests that real alerts will be issued for reasons such as severe floods, fires, and extreme weather. They don’t mention impending obliteration by incoming nuclear ballistic missiles, but that may be another reason, although quite what one should do in such circumstances would appear to be limited. One imagines that an alert would advise people to seek shelter, although places where one could do so effectively strike me as limited at best.
Let’s hope we never get to find
out, or even experience a false alarm of that sort, which was what happened to
unfortunate Hawaiians in 2018 when a missile alert message was sent out in
error and the agency responsible for it spent 40 minutes trying to
work out how to retract it.
There are some people who would have us believe that the
alert system is a means of government instilling a sense of permanent fear in
the general population. Contrarily, these same people offer the view that such a
system will end up being ignored. The alert system is, in some people’s minds,
another method of controlling and cowing the populace, in much the same way as
things such as Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and 15 Minute Cities are and how
covid lockdowns were used to soften us up to accept climate change/net zero
lockdowns, with impositions such as restricting the number of new items of
clothing we can buy in a year, limiting the use of private cars, and the number
of flights we are allowed to take. I’m sure that’s the plot from an episode of Black
Mirror.
The reports that contain many of the ideas that lead people to believe that governments and elite conspirators want to control our every move usually stem from some theoretical, utopian view (or dystopian, depending on your position) of the future produced by a group of academics. On Twitter, these pie in the sky ideas are being presented as though they are established policy, just waiting to be implemented.
These ideas come from a report, The Future of Urban
Consumption in a 1.5°C World, released by Arup, C40 Cities and the University
of Leeds. It’s not government policy, although some people would have us
believe it is, or soon will be.
If anyone is keeping us in constant fear, it’s the media and various influential social media contributors, as much - if not more so - than governments.
We also hear – frequently, and alarmingly – about Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC), and how their introduction will result in cash being abolished and how our spending will be controlled by government who will, through mechanisms like social credit scoring, be able to limit what we are allowed to spend our money on. Along with this, and relying on a 2016 essay by Danish Politician Ida Auken, originally titled, "Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better,” there is a belief that the World Economic Forum will, within the next seven years, collaborate with governments to create systems of control that will end up with everyone but the elite being little more than indentured slaves.
Some targets – banning the sale of petrol and hybrid cars by
2030, making homeowners replace worn out gas boilers with heat pumps – have
become part of government policy, but the deadlines are unlikely to be met and may
recede into the distance and never be met at all since governments are
notoriously unrealistic when it comes to targets and equally useless in meeting
them.
We are frequently warned that government wants to surveil
and control us. Such were the cautions when the NHS Covid app and digital covid
passports were introduced. The app was demised recently and the digital
passports have fallen into disuse (not that they were ever widely required in
my experience). Frankly anyone with a mobile phone voluntarily gave permission
to Apple or Google (or both) to keep them under surveillance long ago (just
look at your timeline in Google Maps), while your bank knows exactly where you
spend every penny, and Tesco’s Clubcard knows about your spending habits in
their stores (that’s exactly why it was designed and built in the first place.
The discounts and vouchers are just sweeteners to keep you handing over your
data).
You could argue that the Covid app’s demise and the
abandonment of the covid passports prove that government has no real desire to
control us. Alternatively, perhaps they were just the warm up before the main
event, merely there to test the water and ensure that when the time comes for
the real deal to be inflicted on us, we will be softened up and ready to
comply. Frankly, a lot of these supposed control mechanisms suggest a lot more
interest in our lives on the part of government than I believe they actually have, and – if they really wanted to
implement them - a far greater degree of competence than they have exhibited in
the past (and in this regard I include governments from both sides of the
political divide). It’s that lack of competence that reassures me that whatever
is suggested, and whether the government intend implementing any of the
policies that have been mentioned, it will be a complete fiasco anyway. As
Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately
explained by incompetence.”
On Sunday, at 3pm I hope to be out of the house somewhere
that’s busy to observe the public’s reaction when the government alert system
causes their phones to suddenly burst into life, apparently spontaneously. In
reality, I’ll probably have forgotten all about it and be taken completely by
surprise, although it would not surprise me one bit if, when three o’clock
comes, my phone, primed and ready for the alert, remains stubbornly silent.
[1] Follow this link to see and hear how the alert will appear on your phone https://youtu.be/MvZM-oCReu8
