To See What Democrats Will Do to America, Look at Britain Today

If you want to know what regulation-happy Democrats are about to do to America, all you have to do is visit Great Britain. There you will see what the Democrats’ ideological soul mates, the British “New” Labour party, have done to that once-great nation.

I’ve been visiting Britain for more than 30 years. But on a recent trip, I was stunned by how rapidly Britain has descended into a quasi-authoritarian society of constant surveillance and endless governmental bullying.

Britain has always had an officious civil service that, since the days of the Revolutionary War, freedom-loving Americans have found intolerable, which is one of the reasons why we broke free of its tyranny; but under the iron-fist of the Labour government virtually every facet of everyday life in Britain has become mired in endless petty regulations, fines and threats of criminal prosecution.

Americans have heard all about how Big Brother is alive and well in the U.K., with more than 4.2 million CCTV cameras watching every move a British subject makes.

But the truth is, the CCTV cameras are only the tip of the proverbial ice berg.

The most paranoid fantasies of American conservatives about Big Government run amok have come true in Britain – which is one reason why the Labour Party and its hapless leader, Gordon Brown, are now facing a citizen rebellion that is almost unprecedented in its ferocity. Polls show that, after 12 years of abusive and increasingly authoritarian power, Labour is going to be trounced in the next election.

“Pilloried, taxed, criminalized, stripped of their few privileges, bound by red tape and lined up for fiscal execution, the middle classes of this country are inured to the nonsense of politicians,” wrote columnist Benedict Brogan while I was there. “The middle classes worked out long ago that their role in the political game is to hand over maximum cash with minimum fuss, to suffer the effects of countless pettifogging intrusions without complaint, and to watch from the sidelines as others jostle for a place in the queue for state handouts.”

I love that word: pettifogging.

It’s the word you hear all the time about Labour’s endless rules, regulations, fines, decrees and threats. The word refers to a class of lawyers in the Middle Ages who made their livings by making a huge fuss over minor or trivial matters.

Just the week I was there, British newspapers chronicled attacks on civil liberties that should give every American chills:

> Britain’s new regime of immigration controls would make the Gestapo proud: Not only are you now asked for your “papers” at every retina-scanning checkpoint, even U.K. politicians now must produce their passports when traveling inside their own country – as Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling discovered on a recent flight to Scotland.

> Busybody British social workers in Dundee seized all six children from a loving family, including a 4-year-old girl, solely for the crime of being too fat (the social workers decreed that 56 pounds was too heavy for a 4-year-old… so they took the hysterical child away from her family to live in a government-approved orphanage).

> Detective Constable Leanne Shepherd was ordered to cease watching her friend’s daughter or she would face prosecution. The two women trade babysitting chores (for free) while the other worked – a reciprocal arrangement that government bureaucrats declared constituted an “illegal childminding business.”

> A Christian couple who run a hotel are being prosecuted under the Public Order Act of 1986 for commenting to a recent British-born convert to Islam that they feel the Islamic burka is demeaning to women.

But as with Democrats in America, Labour politicians believe that their petty rules and regulations are for the masses, not for themselves.

In a manner very similar to U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s blatant disregard for income tax laws, the British Attorney General, Baroness Patricia Scotland, was recently caught red-handed hiring an illegal immigrant housekeeper (at rock bottom prices) in clear violation of the draconian immigration laws that she herself had dreamed up (for other people, of course). She was fined 5,000 pounds for failing to photocopy the immigration documents her employee had allegedly shown her.

Ordinary Britons could barely contain their glee!

“This is revenge, and for the millions of meek, law-abiding people who are increasingly found guilty of inadvertent middle class crimes every day, nothing could be more sweet,” wrote Melanie Reid in The Daily Telegraph. “Now she knows, like the rest of us, how easy and how painful it is to be on the receiving end of unforgiving, burdensome officialdom… Over-regulation has transferred to us the onus to behave like office clerks in every facet of our own lives, or suffer the consequences. It has trapped ordinary, responsible people and businesses in a web of pseudo-offending.”

As Britain, like the rest of Europe, now turns its back on the petty authoritarianism and nanny state bureaucracies the left-wing parties have imposed on them over the past decades, Americans would do well to think long and hard about whether we will allow the Democrats to force the same authoritarian agenda on us and strip America of the civil liberties that made us what we are.