In his most recent musings, The Waterman touches upon complaining States Members, bullying, Guernsey Post, Sure, digital safety and more.
Time was when our freedoms were being gradually eroded. Not anymore. These days coaches and horses are being driven through them.
Whilst some might argue that the latest States have made a decent fist of putting round pegs in round holes and square pegs in square holes, I argue that politicians shouldn’t be put in holes in the first place. Why? Because whilst they are focussed on their own little area over which they have been charged with direction, they are ignoring what their colleagues and others are up to. In fact, due to internal rules they are not even allowed to have relevant information until the eleventh hour when it comes up for debate in a thousand plus page Billet d’Etat.
Three months into the new term and at least one States member is already complaining that they are under pressure not to communicate directly with the public or media. Another has thanked me for not revealing their identity as my source of information contained in a 200 strong circular. So we’ve got people elected to represent the public, being bullied against contacting the public.
Unless we want a global Government whose utilities are in private hands then the privatisation of national utilities should never be allowed to happen, on whatever grounds. Even a blatant promoter of capitalism, the former Government Minister Stuart Falla, once said “Monopolies are not in themselves bad. It is the abuse of the monopolistic position which is a problem.”
So what then are we to make of the communications system and locally, the behaviour of Sure, (which to remind you is owned by the Bahraini company Batel whose chairman is a Bahraini prince)?
Aided and abetted by their bosom buddy neighbours Guernsey Post, it is evident that we are being forced to have an online identity in order to communicate. It is obvious to all that technology has had in recent years a gargantuan influence on society, and in the face of so called AI, that influence is set to mushroom. Putting AI in charge of tackling fraud, as the UK Government is planning to do, is rather like sticking King Herod in charge of child care, or criminals in charge of Law Enforcement (at least one of those hasn’t happened). I say that because if it weren’t for technology, frauds and scams
wouldn’t be taking place on anything like the scale they have been since its introduction.
Technology has also brought nations, hospitals, ports, tv networks and Governments to a standstill. Service delays in shops, banks etc are fuelled by either or both parties finding that their cards or card reading equipment doesn’t work. So whilst it has potential to make life easier, which it necessarily has to do in order to obtain custom, it has already displayed many times over its potential to do a lot of damage, whether by design or accident. And national Governments are supposed to be risk averse; it is their duty.
Recently the UK announced plans to make digital ID compulsory for anybody who wants to work. Mandatory ID is bad enough; it is the stuff of Orwell or 1970s “show us your papers” Eastern Europe, but mandatory digital ID takes Big Brother up onto a whole new plane. It forces everybody who wants to work to have an online identity.
I don’t care what anybody says, nothing online is safe. And if even if it were, how naïve is it to assume that it always will be secure? We don’t even know who owns “the cloud” for heaven’s sake. Already I only have to write or search “toothpaste” on my lap top and I start getting pop ups out of the blue promoting or warning me about all sorts of dental stuff for weeks on end. And God help anybody using the word “insurance”. And if you don’t sign up to “cookies” (what a sweet sounding word for “tracking and tracing” that is) then you’ll be deprived of access to all sorts of material of interest.
And look at what happened to some of the Post Office Managers in the UK – they were put in clink because the computers said so. If ever there were a case for national riots, this was it. But no; hardly anybody who wasn’t directly involved batted an eyelid. Pathetic. Wait until it’s your turn. Or your child’s.
Sure Guernsey announced a while ago that anybody not agreeing to have their latest technology (Guernsey Fibre) installed would not only lose their internet connections within a year or so but would also lose their landlines. I see that as blackmail. I acknowledge that as a private company they are entitled to offer or withdraw whatever services they want, but this is surely an abuse of their monopolistic position.
Then we had Guernsey Post announcing plans for cutbacks in postal services by shutting down post boxes. And now we have Sure saying that they are going to take down all public payphones because nobody uses them. According to them.
This means that anybody refusing to give in to their “accept fibre or face the consequences” ultimatum will not only lose their landline but won’t be able to use payphones either. And if there is no post either, then how are they to communicate or be contacted?
In your lead article in your 30 th September issue you quote Sure’s chief commercial officer Simon Baldwin as saying: “As our lives become increasingly digital, the need for traditional phone boxes has continued to decline”.
This sort of remark gives the impression that the move towards “digital life” is an act of God which can’t be helped. It isn’t. It’s a change which has been driven by people like Simon Baldwin. For the last couple of decades we have been told what to like. It’s propaganda; it sends a message “don’t bother complaining because you’re in a tiny minority”. The art of propaganda isn’t necessarily to convince you that your view is invalid, so much as to convince you that hardly anybody else shares it.
And as for Age Concern’s David Inglis saying, according to your report at least, that he didn’t think there would be any complaints about the proposal, what planet is he on? He, you and your readers, can take this a complaint for a start.
The Taliban, or “Teleban” as they should be called recently brought Afghanistan to a standstill by shutting down its fibreoptic connections, citing morality and “fighting evil” reasons. And in this instance I agree with them. I think that whether they know it or not, Sure are serving a nefarious agenda.
I have little doubt that Sure will be the latest powerful entity to cite “financial reasons” for their latest, not so much a nudge or poke these days, but a body slam, towards restriction of societal choice. (Guernsey Post has already done this with their post boxes plan, the Dairy has done it with cheese already and I think will, within a couple for years based on what is happening at the moment, do the same with butter, especially the unsalted product. If you restrict a product’s availability, you restrict its financial potential).
But the financial system on which these arguments are based is fraudulent. Central banks, which are privately owned, create money out of thin air and lend it to nations with an interest rate attached. They control the money supply so can influence its direction. Whatever the rights and wrongs of who is doing what to who in the middle east, it is clear that Israel, a small young nation, has a disproportionate amount of military might for its size. So it must be getting its weapons on the cheap. And who’s funding that? The western taxpayer. There is also evidence emerging that the same elite banking families who control the money supply to nations have been funding eugenics research for decades. In their eyes they are rich and powerful because their genes are good, and if any anybody isn’t in that position it’s because their genes are bad. The latter should be stopped from breeding. Here’s a reported quote from David Rockefeller dated 1994.
We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the light of publicity during these years. But now the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards world Government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past
centuries
And surely the telecommunications network, in the name of globalism, has been given a similar leg up by those who have signed up to the fraudulent – and inflationary – “creation of money from nothing system” (the Bank of England calls it “quantitative easing” these days) designed by the elite for the elite. Anybody remember the days when pages and pages of national newspapers, especially the Sunday editions, were stuffed full of adverts for a variety of ten second ring tones? How expensive were those? One of them, by Crazy Frog, even got to number one in the “pop” charts in
2005.
And don’t get me started on technology’s influence on music since the early eighties. The New Romantic era was appalling enough, but it’s got so bad that even the Wurzels released an AI track earlier this year. “Cutting Hedge technology” they said. I bet AI didn’t write that quip.
Own an online identity if you will. Your choice. But be aware that in so doing you are enslaving future generations to Big Brother. If not for the same reasons, I agree with former Minister Millie Dudley-Owen’s advice: “Get off your devices”. She didn’t get re-elected. As a former deputy said: “The thought that the worst government ever is a product of the worst electorate ever never seems to emerge.
– Matt Waterman