“The middle class” is a catch-all phrase for a huge section of society, encompassing pretty much the full range of politics. I would hope that, in any healthy society, there is no single thing that the middle class should believe. They should disagree with each other.

> a lot of middle-class people I’ve spoken to online about this

Insert belief here. Most people are middle-class, so this is hardly surprising. Both Labour and the Tories, for instance, have policies predominantly designed by and aimed at middle-class people, so a lot of middle-class people you speak to will support the Government while a lot of middle-class people you speak to will oppose them. It’s not their middle-classness that’s the issue: it’s their Labourness or their Toriness. It makes little more sense to blame the middle classes for this mess than it does to blame the British — yes, those to blame are British, but so what? So are those who oppose them.

The Telegraph is full of opposition to the police state, while containing a few writers who spout exactly the the-innocent-have-nothing-to-fear idiocy you mention. The Mail tends to support it except when it comes to social workers stealing children. The Guardian have helped to drive the creation of large parts of it, while vociferously opposing other bits. These are some of the collected opinions of the middle classes. I fail to see the unity that you think you’ve found.

> Part of what seemed to piss these people off was not just that some ‘hippies’ and ‘Trots’ believe we’re moving towards a police state

And most of those hippies and Trots are middle-class, too. So you have some middle-class people disagreeing with some other middle-class people.

> that someone should bring politics (bo-ring!) up at all when more pressing matters like funny photoshopped pictures or clips of old kids TV on YouTube.

I’m interested in politics, but there is more to life, and I too get pissed off if someone interrupts a perfectly good conversation about Fenella the Witch to start going on about the state.

Is that directed at my original point? I should explain:
The middle class are the kind of people who *should* be complaining about this Police State stuff, as they have the education, media access and leisure time that the working class generally don’t, barring the odd geek autodidact.

However, a lot of middle-class people I’ve spoken to online about this (usual caveats about anecdotal evidence), far from being up in arms, are generally supportive of increased police powers and new laws. As I’ve said above, they fall back on the old “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve nothing to fear” chestnut, and appear to have an unshakeable faith in the Government’s ability to “do the right thing”. What’s worse is that, if one raises concerns, it leads to accusations of being some kind of lefty troublemaker – one of “the civil liberties brigade”. We’re not talking apolitical here, we’re talking anti-political.

Part of what seemed to piss these people off was not just that some ‘hippies’ and ‘Trots’ believe we’re moving towards a police state, but that their imagined ideology-free field of vision should be polluted with such ideas, that someone might taint their guilt-free consumption of culture by introducing cold, ugly reality. that someone should bring politics (bo-ring!) up at all when more pressing matters like funny photoshopped pictures or clips of old kids TV on YouTube. It’s symptomatic of the anti-intellectual ‘permissive narcissism’ that’s turning reasonably intelligent people into socially pliable drones.

Or “keep supplying me with new and improved consumer product, and you can arrest all the d4rkies you want”.

“It’s not the middle classes who aren’t concerned. It’s the majority.”

Don’t confuse ignorance with lack of concern.

I reckon whichever shower of idiots introduced secrecy in the children’s courts probably did weigh up the relative merits of secrecy and bad decisions, but did so considering the proportion of bad decisions then on the books, without considering that that proportion would increase dramatically once secrecy was established.

Secret courts taking kids away from their parents are a good example of that. If nobody in the chain is an idiot then you can see the good intention behind it, but all it takes is one or two incompetents and you’ve got something that makes Kafka seem like an optimist. See also the satanic abuse scandals, as detailed ad nauseam in Private Eye. A good idea gets corrupted by loonballs and innocent people suffer.

Ten years ago I probably would have checked myself into an asylum if I wrote “we are sleepwalking into a police state”. I am very depressed by the way things are going. Britain is a classic case of a liberal state throwing away a culture they think of as repressive, and then when chaos ensues resorting to authoritarianism or fascism.

That is so depressing. I thought it was going to be one of those articles that start with the “oh my gosh” headline, but becomes more reasonable as it progresses and at the end you realise that it what is happening isn’t that bad. In this case it just got worse the more you read.

It’s not the middle classes who aren’t concerned. It’s the majority.