Why We Need a Fair Society – Will Hutton
September 26th, 2010
“Ever more sophisticated CCTV policing the fortresses of the rich and the desolate housing estates of the disadvantaged has become the iconic social intervention of the age.”
This phrase jumped out at me today while reading the Observer and Will Hutton’s long and accurate portrayal of broken Britain and the reasons why https://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/26/them-and-us-will-hutton
Within this blog I have written about housing estates with obtrusive CCTV – Maiden Lane for a start – and mentioned gated communities but it wasn’t until I read Will Hutton’s article that I saw how these two were related and in the worst possible way, both symptoms of a widely separated and decaying society ill at ease with itself.
This is clearly part of the problem that regenerating the Modernist estates is only going to partly solve. So long as the disparities of wealth and shortage of subsidised housing persist then so will the cameras. They are not here to stay. Unlike others I do believe there will come a time when we as a society will be able to do away with the “surveillance state”. But that time is not yet, not even close.
Will Hutton is not himself blameless, sadly. I didn’t write this brief article to have a go at him, I think he is an astute commentator on the political scene, but this line from one of the comments does reveal the other side of the coin. Subscription only link:-
Will Hutton is the Left-wing commentator famed for his attacks on Britain’s landlord culture … yet his family’s housing empire is a monument to the profit motive