Springsteen Guitarist Calls England A 'Police State' After Cops Shutdown Concert

Bruce Springsteen and Steven Van Zandt perform live on stage during the second day of Hard Rock Calling at Hyde Park on July 14, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Jim Dyson/Getty Images)

“An Excessively Efficacious Decision”

Two songs after Beatles legend Paul McCartney joined Bruce Springsteen onstage at the Hard Rock Calling concert, London police turned off the sound, forcing the musicians to leave the stage in silence without so much as a thank you or good-bye.

Frustrated guitarist and ex-Sopranos actor, Steven Van Zandt, took to Twitter to vent his anger:

One of the great gigs ever in my opinion. But seriously, when did England become a police state?

— Steven Van Zandt (@StevieVanZandt) July 15, 2012

Springsteen had already played a three hour set, and was thirty minutes past the curfew, but as Van Zandt later Tweeted, “English cops may be the only individuals left on earth that wouldn’t want to hear one more from Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney!”

Even London mayor, Boris Johnson, said the police had gone a bridge too far.

“It sounds to me like an excessively efficacious decision,” he told LBC Radio in London. “If they’d have called me, my answer would have been for them to jam in the name of the Lord.”

Johnson hastened to point out that nothing like this would happen at the London Olympics.

Obviously Van Zandt is exercising a bit of hyperbole here, largely for effect, but is he that wrong? Is England a police state?

Quite possibly, though not for the rather benignly stupid act of shutting down a rock concert.

Big Brother Is Watching You

A webcam overlooks a client checking her email at an Internet cafe in north London on Friday, May 18, 2012. Experts say Britain's proposed new surveillance program will gather so much data that spooks won't have to read Britons' messages to guess at what they're up to. (AP)

“We are sleepwalking into a surveillance society where we’re watched from control rooms by anonymous people,” says Emma Carr of Big Brother Watch (a group with an unfortunate set of initials.) “The worrying thing is that we don’t actually know how many CCTV cameras there are out there.”

We do know, however, that London is the most camera-laden city in the Western world, and that despite the sheer volume of domestic surveillance that occurs there, the city is no safer – at least according to a recent report.

These cameras have cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds, and estimates place the total number anywhere from 1.85 million cameras to over 4 million, though nobody is quite sure.

Big Brother Watch is an aptly named watchdog group given the old 1984 slogan: Big Brother Is Watching You. The English government may not be the totalitarian bullies out of Orwell’s fiction, but they are most certainly watching.

Indeed, England’s privacy-quashing policies have been the work of various political parties, and extend well beyond the city streets. After the terrible London riots in 2011, British PM David Cameron said the government would consider ”whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence.”

This naturally met with widespread backlash from citizens and social media companies alike, and the UK government backed down. That internet censorship even came up as a possibility points to a worrying trend in the UK toward an increasingly invasive government. Despite civil liberties talk early on in the Cameron government, such priorities seem to have fallen by the wayside.

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