Question Time has to be one of the most annoying programmes on television, although perhaps still slightly more tolerable than an episode of Jeremy Kyle. Every week we are treated to a litany of bland politicians towing their bland party lines, plus a series of ‘free thinkers’ usually on the hard left or hard right to balance the insanity. Playing to the audience like a troupe from the Royal Shakespeare Company participants herald such platitudes as ‘We created bin Laden so we should be bombing ourselves’ or ‘The Afghans were better off under the Taliban’, that one even more depressing because it came from a teenage girl, oh the irony. Quite often we are implored to ‘Think of the children’, whatever that means. Perhaps the apogee of this depressingly anti-intellectual trend is the ever popular catchphrase ‘It’s just like 1984, this is’ You can imagine the round of applause that usually gets from the suitably earnest audiences.

Presumably this idea has something to do with the fact that we have more CCTV cameras than anywhere else in the world. Unless I missed a fairly crucial edition of The Times, I wasn’t aware of the outbreak of World War Three or that the state was forcing us to do callisthenics every morning via our TVs. Although Mr Motivator’s strange success in the 1990s may indeed have been a sinister Fascist experiment. In fact I don’t remember a chapter in 1984 whereby members of the proletariat were able to have a rather hilarious punch-up with the Deputy Prime Minister and get away with it. Maybe that bit just didn’t make the final edit.

We are constantly warned that we are living in a ‘Surveillance Society’, (cue unsettling music), but isn’t that a good thing? After all we are always urged to ‘look out’ for each other, isn’t the CCTV system just a really efficient version of Neighbourhood Watch without the twitching curtains and the gossip? Anyway we can’t rely on the pensioners to keep an eye out anymore because they’re all watching Jeremy Kyle. And does anyone really think that the Government employs armies of sinister agents to track our every routine lives as we do our weekly shop at Tesco’s and drive the kids to school? They’d probably fall asleep on the job through sheer boredom. Granted MPs may employ lots of utterly useless people, including themselves, but I think there’s a limit to their largesse. No-one actually watches the CCTV tapes, apart from the occasional pervy security guard. But since when did pervy security guards threaten Western democracy?

In fact virtually the only time these tapes are watched is when they provide evidence for a serious criminal investigation. CCTV footage has been used to solve virtually every type of vicious crime from rape and murder to armed robbery. Without CCTV footage Crimewatch would have to rely on those crappy artists impressions; incidentally is it me or can you automatically spot a sex pest from their terrible choice of glasses combined with scary facial hair? More recently CCTV footage was instrumental in the investigation into the attempted 21/7 attacks.

In fact I would press for more information being held by the police. This week two extremely dangerous criminals were convicted due to the fact that the police held their DNA on a database system. However the police only held their DNA by chance and both dangerous men had the opportunity to commit more crimes before they were caught. If everyone in the country was made to contribute to the DNA database, with ample safety measures, then the police would be able to do their job a lot faster and we would all be a lot safer. Our medical and dental records are already on file so why not our DNA? And what if our DNA somehow fell into the wrong hands, what are people going to do, clone us? Rather depressingly European judges are planning to order our police to destroy 500,000 DNA samples on ‘privacy’ grounds. By that logic I could stop dentists from holding my dental records, doctors from holding my medical records and banks from holding my account numbers.

As long as there are sufficient safeguards there is nothing wrong with public bodies holding some of our private details. We live in a democracy and we are protected from the Government by the law. How many cases of identity theft involving publicly held information have there been? My guess is not many, apart from the sniper in The Day Of The Jackal. Yes those two cds were lost in the post but has anyone actually lost any money as a result? In any case that problem was simply the result of lax security measures, not a particularly hard thing to fix when you consider banks handle billions of pounds of cash without loosing any. When people moan about living in a ‘surveillance society’ it’s a bit like when people say we have a ‘Third World health service’. The fact is that most of the world has no access to healthcare and millions of people live in societies that are as cruel as Orwell’s Airstrip One.

China’s one billion citizens are constantly brainwashed into accepting that ‘The Party’ is ruling for the good of the people. Just to make sure that people have fully understand the message they employ thousands of agents to monitor what people are saying on internet blogs and chatrooms. People who don’t quite understand how good The Party are to them are taken away for ‘re-education’. Of course some pesky citizens refuse to believe the truth and they are shot or thrown in prison; all for the good of the ordinary people of course. Rumours that the party is massively corrupt or that it committed mass murder and destroyed the economy are of course spread by agents of ‘The Enemy’.

Several Islamic regimes also rule societies which are incredibly similar to Airstrip One. In Saudi Arabia Wahhabism is the only religious, political, social or cultural belief you are allowed to have. Saudi TV is all about what the local Sheikh did today, (Saudi Jeremy Kyle ends with a live stoning), religious police enforce the strict religious laws and the movement of citizens is rigidly controlled. At this very moment a Saudi woman faces public beheading because she had a coffee with a male colleague at the local Starbucks. Even Orwell at his bleakest could not have created a more depressing story. Iran is a society just as rigidly controlled as Saudi. They buy into the whole 1984 thing even more as Terhan is dotted with murals reminding the citizens they are in a state of war with the Great Satan, Eurasia, I mean the USA. The Iranian regime even bans access to Facebook, can you believe that kids? Oh won’t somebody please think of the children??!! And I’ve not even mentioned North Korea the 1984 nightmare as imagined by Orwell alive and well in the 21st century.

You see that’s the really sad thing about these people on Question Time. If they aren’t pulling the party line they are so full of self loathing and self obsession that they can only string a sentence together to kick their own country. Yet millions of people across the world toil under the oppression of true totalitarian regimes. And these aren’t just regimes that control freedom of movement or freedom of speech. The most powerful point in 1984 was that regimes can control the minds of the people and influence what they think. If Orwell was alive today he would no doubt be reporting the loss of free thought in Iran, Saudi Arabia and North Korea. It is these problems that we should be concerned about not what a PC may or may not be doing with our DNA.