The New Dark Age.

I know, whenever anyone mentions ‘police state’, the drones scoff. Police state? You’re mad. Your tinfoil hat is too tight. There’s no police state and it’s not going to happen.

Well, let’s see. You can now be arrested in the UK for criticising a councillor. You can be arrested for posting a picture of a football team’s new shirts. Your car will soon be fitted with mandatory tracking devices that can even tell if you’re wearing a seat belt. I’m ahead of that one with Panoptica. Only the politicians have cars.

You can’t have a gun and if you’re caught with any kind of knife outside your kitchen, you’re in trouble. Carpenters have been known to have the police called on them because they have a bag full of sharp things in public. Criminals are armed and if you try to defend yourself, you will be arrested and charged. Yes, yes, I know, there have been repeated statements by the various suited monkeys in the various shades of government to the effect that we are allowed to defend ourselves, but those victims keep getting arrested and charged anyway.

There have also been repeated announcements that taking photos in public is perfectly legal, but kids taking photos of trains still get arrested and have their photos deleted anyway. Some police – and worse, the petty officials who think they have police powers – now make up whatever laws they want and enforce them without bothering about all that ‘legality’ nonsense.

Dogs are now dangerous weapons. Some breeds are already banned, calls are starting for all large breeds to be banned and (again I’m ahead on this one so far) eventually keeping dogs will be illegal, then keeping any kind of pet will be illegal. Animals will only be allowed on State-registered farms and you can’t go there.

[UPDATE: Bloody hell, that didn’t take long! And in the comments, here come the drones…

I think the reverse should apply too. Put a chip in every dog owner to keep track of them.- ML Young, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK., 21/4/2012 05:41]

Your dog must be microchipped and soon so will your children. And you. How? Easy. First you get your money in a chip attached to your mobile phone. Inevitably the theft of mobile phones will rocket because they are now worth more, even the cheap phones, because they are your wallet. Let the public get all worked up and then offer them the chance to have the chip implanted so they can’t lose it or forget it, and nobody can steal it. The drones will jump at the chance to be the first one to buy lunch with, literally, a wave of the hand. Can’t you just see the adverts now?

Well, maybe not. By the time we get to the microchips, everything will be in plain packaging. Everything.

What’s that? It only applies to tobacco, you say? Oh, do wake up. The destruction of tobacco branding is only the beginning. Once they prove that they can use the law to take a company’s branding away, they will instantly apply the same principle to alcohol and MacDonald’s. Fancy buying a chocolate bar in a plain grey wrapper with a picture of rotting teeth on it? A burger in a grey box covered in the image of a liposuction jar? How about a beer in a grey can with a cirrhotic liver plastered across it?

Will CAMRA realise what’s happening then, or will they wait until they are declared far-right extremists who want to intoxicate children? I hear the scoff of a CAMRA member, I think. Consider this over your warm flat beer – do you really believe that the tobacco companies are trying to get children hooked, or is it more likely that the antis just made that up? Do you think they will never, ever apply that same trick to the booze companies? Look harder. They already have. Do you really still think you aren’t on that list?

No police state? Not even when arrests are routinely made now by staving in your front door at dawn? Not even when people are threatened with jail for insulting an official? Not even when children have their photos deleted because they might be terrorists?

What’s coming is worse than a police state. Worse than Mao’s China of blue overalls. Once you have a ban on smoking in pubs, it’s simple to extend that principle to drink, fat, salt, sugar, chocolate, caffeine, anything. Anything can now be declared ‘as bad as smoking’ and the drones will accept it.

Plain packaging is coming because the game is rigged. Vlad Lansley doesn’t care about health, he just wants to control your life, and I’m not just talking to the smokers here. If they win this one, they then have a legal precedent to remove the branding from any product they don’t like and there is a very long list.

Minimum pricing for alcohol will become minimum pricing for fizzy drinks and chocolate bars and burgers and bacon, then for all meats, then for all foods. All in plain wrappers so the children don’t see them and get enticed into sin.

(A digression – how come the government can ignore the EU’s ruling that minimum pricing is illegal, and yet can’t ignore the ECHR’s ruling that terrorists can’t be deported?)

The future isn’t bleak. It’s empty. It has nothing in it at all.  Grey boxes stacked behind grey doors in grey shops staffed by grey people. The reasoning will be that you can’t buy any bad stuff if you don’t know it’s there. If it’s not advertised you won’t even know it exists. If you do try to buy any of the bad things, the grey shop people will put you through an hour of interrogation and then call the police.

There can be no innovation in that world. People will still think of new things but what’s the use when you aren’t allowed to show it to anyone or even let anyone see it? TV will consist of the Propaganda Channel and internet will be back on low-resolution text-only monochrome screens because those screens can’t show porn.

As the list of restrictions on what can be shown in films and books grows, people will stop bothering to make new ones and the old ones will be banned because they might depict sex or violence or smoking or drinking or bad language or freedom, and we can’t have the children getting inconvenient ideas like those.

What’s coming is a new Dark Age, and future historians will wonder what happened to the human race in the 21st century because it will look very much as if nobody did anything at all, even though the records of the time are complete for every single person’s life in 15-minute increments.

You know the worst part? An awful lot of people will just accept that grey world. They won’t do anything about it at all and they will report any who try.

It’s happened before in individual countries but this time it’s global. This time there is no wall to climb over.