We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

My nomination for ‘Icons of England’

This was the text of what I submitted for inclusion as an ‘icon of Britain’ via the Department of Culture, Media & Sport website mentioned by Guy Herbert yesterday:

The CCTV camera is the perfect icon for Britain today, summing up the nature of the changing relationship between civil society and political state. They are an innovation in which Britain leads the world both technologically and in usage and are the visible manifestation of so many things which happen out of sight. It is almost impossible to avoid their gaze for an entire day and sitting like steel crows on their perches above us, truly they are emblematic of modern Britain.

The thing is, I am not taking the piss, this really is modern Britain…

iconic_CCTV.jpg

49 comments to My nomination for ‘Icons of England’

  • Old Jack Tar

    The thing is, I am not taking the piss

    No, in truth you’re not and I agree completely. That is rather depressing.

  • A_t

    Fantastic… hope they allow it. Seems like a better symbol of today’s Britain than any of the other shite they’ve included.

  • Della

    How about the book 1984 (which was written in England I think), or the figure of Big Brother who is based on a character in an English book, and whose image is based on Clement Atlee who was an Englishman.

  • Julian Taylor

    The CCTV camera isn’t really an image of England, just an icon of Tony Blair’s shallow nuBritainnia. What I think they are looking for is one single image that any foreigner can see and immediately be aware that this means England. A similar example would be a classic CocaCola bottle or logo as a depiction of the USA, since ‘cocacola’ is one of the few words that most of the planet knows.

  • guy herbert

    They screen the nominations, unfortunately, so it ought to have been written with more oblique irony if you hope to appear on the page.

    Something like:

    Britain leads the world in making ordinary people’s lives more secure by surveillance. We have more public CCTV than any other country (including much bigger ones such as the US). Walk down the street in any English city or town and you are watched over by dozens of unsleeping eyes. Everywhere they protect us from irresponsible motorists. It is a sign of how fast we are progressing towards integrating informnation technology into everyday life here. The CCTV camera is the epitome of progress in modern England.

    If you want a logo, rather than an icon for New Britain, it has been thoughtfully provided here.

    Consider it a trailer for my returning to the theme of “soft fascism”.

  • emy

    So Tony B wants respect, – I thought Galloway had already got that one…

    Can we look forward to Tony B taking part in Big Brother, – it is probably something more suitable to his intellectual ability than his present job.

  • emy

    John Bull is as close as you could get to a universal icon. It is recognized the world over, and yet – no one seems to have offered it as a suggestion…

  • Laughing Cavalier

    This morning (10th January) I nominated fox hunting and conkers knowing that they are just the sort of thing our Lords and Masters disapprove of. I received an acknowledgement to each makingf it clear that they were subject to scrutiny – which I take to mean censorship. Neither have appeared on the website. The English flag, the Cross of St. George, nominated by a number of others has been censored too.

    This whole exercise is no more than cynical propaganda attempting to portray England as NuLabour wants it – marginalised, emasculated and punished for not voting NuLabour in recent elections.

    PS How on earth did they manage to spend £1m on that website? No wonder Gordon is running out of money.

  • permanent expat

    emy: Didn’t you know? John Bull died years ago; he was the final tragic casualty of WWII.

  • Julian Taylor

    Exactly how is the John Bull character known the world over, especially considering that its almost unheard of in the UK now except on the label of certain brands of draught bitters? Certainly an icon of The Queen would be more recognisable to most than an image of John Bull, after all many commonwealth countres still have her cameo on their postage stamps.

    If you really want to annoy Blair and his Eurofans then how about an icon of Churchill giving his V salute – it means victory for us and means something a lot more insulting to the French.

  • Mike

    This is very good. Witty, succinct and serious. And very diffucult to argue with. More like this from Samizdata please!

  • karl rove

    Talking of paranaoia, how come Samizdata is the only site which has to have an anti-spam code? Ablution, Politburo, Page Liberale etc. survive without.

  • gravid

    Spam is the work of beelzebub and all his little wizards. Why not have protection against it? I go with the CCTV cameras. gets my vote. Down with people?

  • permanent expat

    ………………….a plughole?

  • guy herbert

    I see they are also looking for nominations for the advisory board. The current list shows how far they’ve stretched themselves to find an eclectic and broadly representative group likely to command the respect of the general public.

  • ian

    Well I’ve had another go – with this slightly more oblique version.

    The CCTV camera is a ubiquitous feature of the street scene in 21st century England. We have more public CCTV than any other country (including much bigger ones such as the US). Walk down the street in any English city or town and you are watched over by dozens of cameras, demonstrating in a very public way the changed nature of our society.

  • permanent expat

    I had a brief butchers at the icon site. I think one of them was a ship; maybe the Titanic.

  • guy herbert

    emy – … Tony B taking part in Big Brother…

    I fear he is more interested in taking the part of Big Brother. Apparently we may have a Ministry of Respect shortly, Hazel Blears has already taken the title of Minister for Respect.

  • mbe

    What I particularly like about the ‘icons’ is that they are about England. The idiots can’t even distinguish between England and Britain:

    “Some people argue there is no such thing as a shared English culture. They say all those invasions by the Normans and Romans simply left us with a ‘hotch potch’ of other people’s cultures. Paradoxically, this melting pot is what makes England unique. And today’s multicultural communities make this mix even more vibrant and interesting.”

    Who argues there isn’t a shared English culture? No-one I know, even those who prefer to be called British but support England at sport.

    New Labour have systematically dismantled the UK and now, quite generously, want to give England a website instead of an assembly. Wankers.

    If the list is added to in the next few years, a nice shiny ID card, with a huge database behind it, would be my nomination.

  • Verity

    God, Hazel Blears. The roll call of these nonentities doing non-jobs still depresses me, years later.

    The project is England, not Britain, folks. I would like to put forward cricket on the village green. (Just on Samizdata. I’m certainly not responding to their dimwit site. Since when did English icons become the government’s business?)

  • Tuscan Tony

    Like it Verity, why don’t we do a realicons.blogstpot.com site and round up some proper uncensored thoughts?

  • Would folks here mind the cameras as much if they knew only computers were looking at a vast majority of the feeds, alerting humans only when a crime might be occuring?

    How about if all such alerts became public to everything, not just the police, so that the openness is a good defense against abuse.

    I happen to write software that takes advantage of cameras like these, so I tend to see their utility more than their ability to abuse. I think this mainly because I hope humans wouldn’t be needed at all for the given reasons the cameras exist.

    Assume all sorts of things like open source & standards….

  • mbe

    I’m with Verity and TT:

    I’d go for:

    The Cenotaph
    Village/Country Pubs (Smoking Allowed Throughout)
    A bloody huge Oak tree
    Roast Beef and Yorkshire pudding

    Amongst others. In fact, the futilty and irrelevance of the ‘icon’ project is that we have too many symbolic representations to whittle them down to a handful.

    And Ivan: NO.

  • Johnathan

    My icons:
    Tea;
    Roast beef;
    cricket;
    Winston Churchill;
    Classic sports cars;
    Bobby Charlton
    The village pub;
    Aston Martin;
    and of course:
    007 and Sherlock Holmes.

  • ed

    I’ve been living in Prague for a while now. It’s certainly not perfect but there is little crime and very few cameras. That combination makes me feel much freer than I did in the UK. So it’s clear, absolutely, that Perry is not taking the piss. How PC to consider he even might be in this case!

  • Talking of paranaoia, how come Samizdata is the only site which has to have an anti-spam code?

    Paranoia? We would be idiots if we did not have a Turing test. Because we often get 20,000 visitors per day, we are a magnet for these bastards. Before we had the test for the comments, we got 50-150 spam comments per day and that was when we got half the volume we do now (even with blacklist screening we get 10-20 spam trackbacks a day and occasionally get hit by a flood of several hundred). Even how we still get 2 or 3 quixotic spammers who enter the damn things manually on posts months or years old in the hope we will not notice (but we are a multi-handed operation and such intrusions are quickly deleted).

  • mbe:
    “And Ivan: NO.”

    No, you wouldn’t mind? You would support the automation I described?

    Either way it’s coming 🙂

  • Captain Gatso

    Take a hammer to the camera and a big boot to the programmers who write the code. Sorted.

  • I nominate the invasion of Iraq. What, you mean it wasn’t your idea? Oh well. What I want to know is how are they going to keep non-Britains from participating? Not that I care enough to vote.

  • Tanuki

    I find it amusing and sadly ironic that the majority of the icons on the front page are icons of London, not of England.

    That just about sums up the metrocentrist Westminster-village urbanites of NuLab.

  • Paul Marks

    I agree – the electronic eye is the icon of modern Britian.

    As predicted in such shows as “1990” (not to be confused with the space show “1999”) back in the 1970’s

    The Public Control Department is very Blair New Labour (or Cameron “Not Conservative”).

  • mbe

    Ivan, well picked up, you worded your question like a career politician!

    Basically, I would very much doubt whether you would get a single supporter on this site for your no doubt highly lucrative software. I would quite happily lend Captain Gatso one of my boots.

    Are you Ivan and Ivan Kirigin? Stop “non-Britains” from participating? We talking about England’s icons!

    Another, essential, icon:

    Margaret Thatcher

  • I am not Ivan of Morzh.com

    I would maintain that the software is amoral, i.e. usage matters most. A robot could use similar algorithms to help your grandmother stay out of a nursing home.

    As I mentioned, it is coming.

  • Verity

    Why shouldn’t foreigners vote for English icons?

  • mbe

    The software may well be amoral but the coder and user have both a moral and ethical obligation to ensure that it is not used or employed in an immoral way.

    Unfortunately, you have opened Pandora’s box. Yet another intrusion from the geekside.

  • Crosbie

    Seurity cameras – brilliant. That deserves to win. This is why Perry de Havilland is the man!

  • mbe

    We should try to annoy, irritate and infuriate the New Labour lackeys that are running this fiasco. Everyone who reads this site should nominate:

    The Magna Carta

    They’ve probably never heard of it.

  • notveryanonymous

    Della,

    On a slightly less inarticulate note to my previous post – 1984 may well have been been based on Clement Attlee, and be written by an Englishman, but it was authored on the Scottish island of Jura. As a Scot, I hope this wasn’t an essential act of inspiration.

  • permanent expat

    I do remember Stanley Holloway’s monologue on Magna Carta. It ends with: “……And it’s through that there Magana Carta, as was signed by King John of old, that in England today you can do what you like…..
    so long as you do what you’re told.”
    Poor Stanley, little did he know.

  • Mary Contrary

    I don’t like “me too” posts, expressingly nothing more than agreement with and admiration for the original poster. What a waste of everybody’s time they are.

    So I’ll shut up.

  • permanent expat

    Well said, Mary, and I admire you & agree with you.

  • My icons are:

    Real Ale
    Wild English Boar (mmm…)
    The Spitfire
    Jaguar E-type/AC Cobra
    Iron Maiden
    Lady Thatcher
    Winston Churchll
    Palace of Westminster
    Magna Carta

  • Deuce

    So I’ll shut up

    For which I thank you.

  • Verity

    No one’s mentioned pub signs yet.

  • Crosbie

    Mary, sorry about that post. I broke a longstanding rule about not posting whilst drunk. It won’t happen again.

  • Verity

    This is another Blairesque attempt to “brand” England.

    It’s so insulting that it takes the breath away.

  • Verity, pardon my ignorance/naivete, but why is it insulting?

  • Verity

    Ivan – We don’t need our country “branded” by some cheap fly boy and his wide boy friends. We have developed our own character over 2,000 years.

  • Verity

    It really looks as though Tony and Gordy have realised that the British don’t really want to lose their identity to Tone ‘n’ Gordy’s brave new world.

    No problem! We’ll do a U-turn! We’ll let them choose a national icon and we’ll give them a national day!
    (Link)

    Do not go to this link if you’ve just eaten. There is a picture of Gordon Brown smiling and it is, if anything, more alarming than Gordon Brown normal bovine expression. Vivacity does not suit Mr Brown.