Simon Carr: Databases will be the ruin of us all

The more doctors screen for diseases the less they will examine patients

The Database State has been in the news again. These huge statistical compilations in health, education, justice, welfare, are the wonders of the age. They are chapters in a new Domesday Book. It is the required reading of our new rulers.

What is called Britain's political class is in fact quite a new thing, plaited together out of many different strands, interest groups and professional blocs. How it has expanded over the last decade – in power, money and reach.

The number of people looking to a minister for guidance or advancement multiplies every year. Political institutions are metastasizing. All sorts of professionals are being drawn into the class. There's no point in trying to stop it happening. It – they – are unstoppable. We complain about it, and every now and again there's a small victory. The Legislative and Regulatory Reform was going to give formidable powers to ministers to amend primary legislation by fiat. Same with the data-matching powers in the Coroners and Justice Bill. In both cases, the outcry caused the proposals to be withdrawn (rather to the surprise of the out-criers).

It won't stop them. They'll get something like it in the end. There are too many administrative advantages to databases. In statistical series we can discern patterns that individual cases don't reveal. Patterns of spending, travel, communication, income . They can reveal every sort of deviance from cancer to terrorism.

Many of us struggle to argue against these practical effects. We talk about invasion of privacy and liberty and so forth. But we have no real argument against those who say: "The age of privacy's finished: get over it." Or to those who defend CCTV for its ability to identify violent criminals. But let's not focus on what these instruments of intrusion do to the society we live in. Look at what they do to the people who are using them. The class is becoming ever more removed from the rest of us. They use statistical series because we – the spiky, rebarbative citizenry – are at our most manageable when we are a screen experience.

But the more our masters rely on the screen, or the data series, the more they will lose of their personal instincts. The richer the statistical environment, the less merit they will find in action.

The more they can track our movements electronically, the less they will have to get out and follow us personally. The more they rely on CCTV, the fewer police on the streets there will be. The more they screen for disease, the less they will examine patients.

The fewer the flag-ups on a social service database, the less teachers and social workers will look at the family, or the pupil. The more they can monitor spending patterns of suspected benefit cheats, the less they will have to know what is happening in the neighbourhood. The more they can monitor terror cells remotely, the fewer recruits they will need to send into the community and the less understanding they will have for what is going on. And the longer the data series, the larger the mistakes they will make.

But the long-term damage is really on the class itself. The less they get out, the paler they will become. The more arrogant, and dictatorial, the more alienated they will be. If they can follow us on camera and bark orders at us through a microphone, the more they will atrophy as leaders. That at least is beyond argument.

Simoncarr@sketch.sc