The Guardian reports that Salvation made £6.94 million in its first weekend, topping Wolverine's previous 2009 record of £6.66 million. This despite both movies receiving equally bad reviews in the UK as they did in the US, so it's not as if they gained some extra credibility and/or quality on the trip across the Atlantic. So what's going on?

It's not as if the UK is so science fiction-starved that they'll go see anything; yes, Doctor Who is having a half-year off, but British audiences have just finished new seasons of Ashes To Ashes and Primeval and have Torchwood returning in little over a month. Perhaps, then, the subject matter of the movies have just captured the British imagination more readily than they have the American. While US audiences shied away from the American dystopia of Terminator and evil-military of Wolverine for reasons of events still in recent memory, British audiences have more distance on those concepts - and, perhaps, more eagerness to see America get trashed. Perhaps they see it as karmic payback for the international upset caused by the Bush administration.

(This idea - that non-American audiences may be more in tune with things going wrong for Americans in movies, because they're (a) not living in America, currently trying to continue the Obama-sque feelings of optimism, change and hope despite economic meltdown and coming to terms with what the War On Terror did to the country's moral certainty and (b) instead looking for some sense of international schadenfreude because of said War On Terror and resulting unintended political diplomacy mishaps - may even explain Terminator Salvation's international box office almost matching its entire US take in its first weekend.)

Alternatively, there's always the possibility that the drearier British summers may have had something to do with it; as the Guardian notes,

As with all films currently in the market, Terminator Salvation benefited from dismal weather.

Perhaps that's the next big thing that Hollywood should hope for in the American market, instead of giant robots and old school superheroes; more rain.

Yesterday, the Libertarian Party announced the launch of its “1984 Campaign,” and by today, each Member of Parliament will have received a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four from volunteer members of the grassroots campaign. The books will be inscribed with the admonition: “This book was a warning, not a blueprint.”

But some MPs have been angered by the comparison between modern day Britain and Orwell’s dystopian nightmare. Tom Harris, MP for Glasgow, received his copy of the book a few days ago. In his blog, Harris railed against the intended message in his blog:

[T]here seem to be an awful lot of people out there - perhaps dozens of them - who seem to get strangely exercised at the prospect of a “police state”. Except that what they define as a “police state” is a million light years from what Orwell himself described. CCTV cameras in the street? That’s just like Nineteen Eighty-Four, when families were monitored in their own homes, 24 hours a day! Can’t use racist terms to vilify people any more? Well, surely that’s thought crime, just like Orwell predicted!

What rubbish. As I’ve written here before, this is all paranoid fantasy, and why so many people get off on it, I’ll never know. I recently had the latest in a series of requests from constituents regarding CCTV. Requests to have the cameras removed? No, no, no… Requests for more cameras…

We live in a democracy, and just because those — including my anonymous benefactor — who get excited about such things are unhappy that Labour is in power, that does not make us anything other than a democracy. And democratically-elected governments govern with the consent of the people. Yes, even this one!

The UK government may be democratically elected, but with four million CCTV cameras, Britain is the most-surveyed nation in the world. And censorship of online material, and legislation like the 2006 Terrorism Act, have put increasingly severe restrictions on speech. It might be worthwhile for British legislatures to take this opportunity to pause and reflect on what kind of country they're creating.

Press Release Libertarian UK [via The Labour Party via Reddit]