Why are they spying on us?

9:43am Friday 18th April 2008

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A FEW weeks ago I wrote about the plethora of so-called authorities allowed to legally spy on us - all in the name of national security - by intercepting our post, reading our emails and tapping our phones.

While accepting that the security services and the cops should have such powers, as long as they were underwritten by a judge, I complained that it was dangerous to give the jobsworths at our local councils spying rights on the basis that once they had them they were sure to abuse them.

Soon after publication I had two angry messages from local government bods. How dare I brand them Little Hitlers (I had done no such thing) and I ought to know that they could conceive of no situation that might cause them to invoke such Draconian measures.

Yeah, right.

Fast forward a month or so and a couple from Poole in Dorset are put under surveillance by their local council for two weeks for threatening national security by allegedly sneaking their three-year-old daughter into a primary school outside the catchment area.

And I mean the full James Bond monty: followed on school runs, tracked throughout the day, and watched at night to see where they slept (they owned two homes, one in the right catchment area).

It also transpires that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 has been used to spy on dog-owners suspected of not cleaning up after their pets and to place surveillance cameras in old baked bean tins to catch fly-tippers.

Now both of the above are antisocial acts (although I reserve judgement on that middle class crime' of school-blagging'), but do they deserve to have powers intended to fight terrorism used against them?

Why can't our councils deploy one of their bin police or one-legged, black, bicycling lesbian outreach workers to stand by footpaths and shout: "Oi! Pick that up, mate!"

Isn't that more cost effective than having two nerds from the planning department going out at night with infra-red goggles, those shoes with a compass in the heel and a cyanide capsule just to photograph Mrs Goggins from Number 32 letting her toy poodle do a whoopsie on the footpath?

I HAVE noticed a new badge of honour on the scrote estates - the single, aluminium NHS crutch. You can see them in Lidl or smoking outside flat-roofed pubs; seemingly healthy members of the underclass with a crutch dangling from one arm, supporting nothing more than a benefits claim.

And watch the papers for more evidence. Most of the stories about charity fraudsters, eBay conmen or thieving junior accountants feature a picture of the alleged miscreant, crutch wobbling in the breeze. Only this week a "sicko from Scarborough" who conned Tom Cruise and John Travolta by posing as the grieving dad of dead actor Heath Ledger (yes, I know, weirder sentences you will never read) appeared outside the crown court, crutched-up and seemingly only a gasper away from an oxygen mask.

The Daily Mail this week attempted to draw the family tree of Shannon Matthews' dysfunctional family. It was Mission Impossible from the start; the chart, littered with multiple children by multiple fathers, ended up resembling the formula for DNA.

Still, they helpfully highlighted those family members in jail or on bail for allegedly perverting the course of justice, benefits fraud or, in one case, serving life for murder.

MUCH HAS been made of the impact of economic immigrants from eastern Europe. The lentil-eating Lefties claim they make us all richer; the hard-pressed public services in places like Norfolk complain their children are swamping schools to the point that it's no longer necessary to employ covert surveillance of middle class parents because they've all moved away.

My own experience is overwhelmingly positive, to an embarrassing point. The Polish waitresses in my favourite gastropub are charm personified - a million miles from the surly, resentful, slack-jawed English dole scum who occasionally turn up for work. The organic farm shop where I buy my carrots, artfully smeared with mud, is manned by Lithuanian crop-pickers. But the most impressive bunch of grafters are the Romanian gipsies who run the car-wash operation at my local Tesco. I often struggle to get my car back from them, such is the care they lavish upon it, and all for a tenner.

And you know what? Not one of them has a magical Tin Leg of Money dangling from their arms.