Britannia Radio

Britain 'nation of form fillers watched by quarter of world's CCTV cameras'

Britain has become a bureacratic and authoritarian state watched over by a quarter of the world's CCTV cameras, a study of Labour's decade in power claims.


By Christopher Hope, Whitehall Editor
Last Updated: 6:50PM GMT 08 Mar 2009
CCTV cameras - Britain 'nation of form fillers watched by quarter of world's CCTV cameras'
An authoritarian state? Photo: GETTY

National debt is running at £175,000 per household, five times more than thought, while each year the Government has passed 3,500 regulations, along with 100,000 pages of rules and explanation.

'The Rotten State of Britain' claims to be the first "deeply researched factual account" of Tony Blair's and Gordon Brown's time in office.

The author Eammon Butler, a director of the leading think tank the Adam Smith Institute, claimed that his book had been turned down by two publishers because of the "unconventional" nature of the content.

He said: "A new form of centralised government and authoritarian government has been created that is worse than ever in Britain's recent history."

Among the claims in the book are that Britain has a quarter of the world's CCTV cameras, the largest of any country and that taxes have risen by 51 per cent since 1997.

Mr Butler also claims national debt is running at £4.6billion, or £175,000 per household, not £729billion (£29,000 per household) as the Government claims.

In the audit of 10 years of the Labour Government, Dr Butler says that there are now 1,406 litter wardens and dog catchers who have been given powers to levy on the spot fines.

Dr Butler said he wrote the book because he got "so angry about the way that they have no concept of the rule of law".

Dr Butler found that in just one year - 2006/7 - half of the 722,464 DNA samples collected by the police came from children, including a seven-month year old girl.

One in nine hospital patients picks up an infection during their stay on a ward, while the total cost of outstanding claims against the NHS is £9.2billion, Dr Butler claimed.

He said that 30,000 of the 200,000 people who die of cancer and strokes each year would survive "if they lived anywhere else in northern Europe".

Dr Butler also claimed in the book that the number of people receiving state benefits has risen from 17million people in 1997 to 21million people by 2007.

He found that nearly six million families receive £16billion-worth of child credit. Dr Butler said: "It's ridiculously high number of beneficiaries for something aimed to help the poorest."

The result is that some families would be better off it he parents did not live together.

He said: "Three-quarters of the poorest households would be better off splitting up. And when money is tight, that is exactly what happens."