They’ve really done it now, I often think when I read something particularly dire about Britain, which is going the way of the increasingly Stasi-like United States. The latest news is that Britain is installing live spy cameras that will shout at people as they walk along the street.

Speaking as a Canadian in the middle, I declare that Tony Blair has gone too far this time. This shall not stand.

Surely honest Britons will now take to the streets and reclaim the rights they won back when they destroyed Margaret Thatcher and her infamous poll tax in 1990. Surely Blair cannot force daily human/electronic surveillance down the throats of the citizenry.

Invariably I am wrong about these things. No one protests. Some peculiar shameful event occurs courtesy of Blair — jury trials dwindle; the police are allowed to arrest anyone and take photos, fingerprints and DNA without charging them; all 11-year-olds are to be tested for criminal tendencies — and life carries on. So it goes, as the late Kurt Vonnegut liked to say.

Britons are like everyone else in the West, endlessly adaptable. I never thought they would accept the imposition of a compulsory identity card, the lack of which can cause a citizen to be thrown into jail. This was a people who tore apart the employment-killing textile looms in 1811, who rose up against slavery, who fought the fascist Blackshirts on Cable Street in 1936.

But it does look as though Britons are going to accept the cameras. There will be little protest from a people I once thought of as principled and truculent, a nation that didn’t panic over IRA bombs.

Heed this voice

Britain already has more CCTVs than almost any other nation. First, these closed circuit TV cameras just took pictures. Then some were going to be given microphones in order to “listen in” on conversations in public places. (This approaches the two-way home telescreens in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.)

Now they are going to hector people in public.

Britain is a very shabby place these days. London is violent enough, but the north of England is a giant no-go area. Massive unemployment, low-grade and high-grade crime, terrible schools, a bleak, featureless, hopeless landscape for the young. That’s Britain today.

Add to this now these new “social control” cameras that will allow municipal employees to bark out commands at whoever they see misbehaving within range of their speakers. The home secretary, which means Emperor of All Matters Domestic, says people will be reprimanded for drunkenness or being in groups or doing anything anti-social.

Opponents, including the Conservative Party, have called it “Big Brother gone mad.” But no. “It’s interactive!” says Home Secretary John Reid. Worse, the government is testing children to be “the voice.” As the Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker remarked, what Reid has done here “is confuse the word ‘interactive’ with ‘nightmarish.’”

Can you imagine standing in a metro station waiting for your bus and being harangued by a disembodied voice? What would it say? I know what it will say:

“Put that down now!”

“She may be your girlfriend but you do that sort of thing in private.”

“Oooooh, that makes me sick. Can’t you use a Kleenex like a normal person?”

“Go home! Your friends are rubbish, you’re wasting your life. Try to grasp the concept of postponing gratification. It’s called emotional intelligence, child! At least get out of school before you self-destruct. Trouble’s coming and it’s wearing its baseball cap backwards. You’ve got junk in your trunk, sister!”

I’m telling

And if it’s a terrifying child’s voice, it will sing out, as all children do, “Nah-nah nah-nah-nah.” Or, as Brooker suggests, “You’re a bad man and I’m telling on you and my dad’s going to tear your head off.”

And then will come this: “Are you just 10 black kids waiting for a bus or are you a gang? Either separate yourselves or stop being black.”

Implausible? Only days ago, Blair, shyly admitting he was “lurching into total frankness,” said black culture was responsible for the spate of current violence.

“Pretending it is not young black kids doing it” isn’t helping, he said, making no mention of widespread poverty or the demonization of Britain’s white poor, aka “chavs,” which stands for “Council House and Violent.” Perhaps Blair is desperately trying to distract attention from his Iraq legacy with his own version of Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech.

This is madness

“He do the police in different voices,” the poet T.S. Eliot wrote, but he didn’t mean this. Why would Brits allow themselves to be so abused?

Get this: Unemployed people in Britain who phone in to ask about jobless benefits are to be given lie-detector tests over the phone. If a caller sounds at all nervous or untrustworthy (read lower class or “chav”), something called Voice Risk Analysis technology will measure the voice changes, pick out the dodgy ones and deny benefits.

The company behind this plan is called Capita. All modern corporations in Britain are called something like this, a name as generic as northeasterly wind.

This is madness.

What worries me most about all this is that the Brits are smart. If Britain is turning into Orwell’s nightmare without a complaint from the populace, and Americans are shouting down anyone who has committed the crime of reading a book once, where does that leave us nice middle-ground Canadians?

We are halfway between the well-meaning brutes and the authoritarian martinets. For once, I hope we can rise above the element that surrounds us. Instead of going along to get along, could we rage against the tide and say no to this sort of thing?

It would be un-Canadian. But no one else is living up to their national stereotype either.

This week

Carolyn Burke’s 2005 biography of the trans-Atlantic surrealist photographer Lee Miller is beautifully done. Miller, a genius at observation in words and pictures, has been dismissed, typically, as an assistant to male artists such as Man Ray. But she was one of the best and bravest journalists in Europe during World War II. It took a surrealist to nail down the mad aspect, the strangeness of war, “the filigree” of barbed wire, the staring eyes.

The last Sopranos episodes have arrived. The TV series will become part of the soundtrack of our lives. Eventually, having watched it as it appeared will date us, like having seen Sarah Bernhardt onstage. Think of that.

The new Anne Lamott essays, Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith, are grimmer than ever. Thus, they are a guide in a dark time.