In December 2025, speaking in public discussion with Tony Blair, the British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood did something that senior ministers are usually careful to avoid. She said plainly what the British state now intends to do, and why.

Reflecting on her time at the Ministry of Justice, Mahmood explained:

“When I was in justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.

“Similarly, in the world of policing, in particular, we’ve already been rolling out live facial recognition technology, but I think there’s big space here for being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals, frankly, which is what we’re trying to do.”

This was reported without irony in The Daily Telegraph on 18 January 2026, under headlines openly comparing the proposal to Minority Report-style policing.

The importance of this statement lies not merely in its content, but in its tone. Mahmood did not speak defensively. She did not hedge. She did not apologise. She described the Panopticon as an “ultimate vision”—a goal frustrated in the eighteenth century by technological limits, now finally achievable through live facial recognition and continuous data integration, both made workable by artificial intelligence. Bentham, she implied, was right. He was merely early.

To understand why a serving Home Secretary can now praise the Panopticon without fear of disgrace, we must turn to Bentham himself—and to the political condition that makes his resurrection inevitable.

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon; or, The Inspection-House (1791) was not a metaphor, nor a cautionary tale. It was a proposal submitted in earnest to the British state. Bentham intended it to be built, operated, and—crucially—profited from. He even offered to run it himself. The basic structure is familiar: a circular building, cells arranged around the circumference, and a central inspection tower. The inmates are fully visible from the centre; the inspector is never visible to them. The subject never knows whether he is being watched, and therefore must behave as though he is always watched.

Bentham was precise about the purpose of this design:

“The essence of it consists in the centrality of the inspector’s situation, combined with the well-known and most effectual contrivances for seeing without being seen.”

This arrangement produces a permanent psychological condition. The subject internalises the gaze of authority. Obedience becomes habitual. Resistance becomes irrational.

Bentham described the result with unmistakable satisfaction:

“A new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”

This sentence alone should disqualify Bentham from polite rehabilitation. The Panopticon is not a humane alternative to punishment. It is a system for manufacturing compliance. Crucially, he never confined this system to prisons. He explicitly proposed it for all institutions in which people were to be managed:

“The same plan may be applied, without exception, to all establishments whatsoever… in which a number of persons are meant to be kept under inspection.”

He lists workhouses, manufactories, hospitals, schools, and any environment where behaviour mattered more than autonomy.

Bentham boasted that his system achieved moral improvement without violence:

“Morals reformed — health preserved — industry invigorated — instruction diffused — all by the mere force of inspection.”

This was the selling point. Surveillance leaves no bruises. It disciplines invisibly. It reshapes conduct while preserving the illusion of freedom.

The Panopticon cannot be separated from Bentham’s utilitarianism. He rejected natural rights entirely, dismissing them as “nonsense upon stilts.” There was no inviolable private sphere. There was no moral limit to state action, except inefficiency. If constant inspection produced better outcomes—less crime, more productivity, greater conformity—then inspection was not merely permissible, but morally required. Liberty had no intrinsic value. It was, at best, a variable to be adjusted.

Bentham’s candour is what distinguishes him from his modern admirers. He did not pretend that surveillance was compatible with freedom. He simply denied that freedom mattered. This is why the Panopticon is such a reliable diagnostic tool. When a political class begins to praise it openly, it is confessing something about its own moral exhaustion.

What Bentham could only approximate through architecture, Shabana Mahmood proposes to perfect through technology. Cameras already saturate public space. Metadata is already harvested at scale. Communications are already logged, stored, and analysed. Artificial intelligence promises to integrate these streams into a single, predictive apparatus. Bentham required inspectors. Mahmood requires none. Algorithms do not sleep. They do not tire. They do not doubt.

Bentham anticipated this ideal when he wrote that the system should function even in the inspector’s absence:

“The inspector’s presence is not indispensable… the inmates should be kept in a state of conscious and permanent visibility.”

This is the governing fantasy of the modern state: power that operates automatically, without discretion and without accountability.

Mahmood’s invocation of criminals having “forfeited certain liberties” is a transparent evasion. Bentham understood that surveillance works best when it is general. Selective inspection creates resentment. Universal inspection creates habits. British history confirms this relentlessly. Powers introduced for terrorism are repurposed for trivial offences. Surveillance justified by emergency becomes routine. The watched population adjusts its behaviour long before any sanction is imposed.

The decisive point is that surveillance is not chosen by confident regimes. A government that believes itself legitimate governs through custom and consent. It governs by persuasion. A government that no longer believes itself legitimate governs through monitoring and fear.

The British ruling class has exhausted every traditional source of authority. It no longer offers rising living standards. It no longer offers national purpose. It no longer offers social mobility, coherent identity, or even competent administration. Its wars have failed. Its economic model has hollowed out the country. Its institutions are distrusted, its media despised, its elections performative. What remains is management.

Surveillance is attractive because it does not require belief. A population need not respect a state in order to fear it. Behavioural compliance can be extracted even from a cynical, hostile, or demoralised people. Bentham promised exactly this: obedience without persuasion, control without legitimacy.

There is something particularly repellent about Shabana Mahmood’s enthusiasm, and it is not merely that she is authoritarian. It is that she is authoritarian without imagination. Bentham was a fanatic, but he was systematic. He understood the implications of his scheme and defended them openly. Mahmood borrows the instruments of domination without the courage to own their meaning. She hides behind the vocabulary of risk, safeguarding, and efficiency, as though these were neutral rather than ideological terms.

Bentham admitted that his system was designed to grind rogues honest. Mahmood pretends that grinding is compassion. This is the voice of a class that has stopped thinking in moral categories altogether.

The ultimate significance of the Panopticon is that it marks the end of politics. Politics presupposes disagreement, persuasion, and consent. Surveillance presupposes none of these. It replaces argument with metrics, dissent with anomaly detection, opposition with risk profiling.

Bentham’s system eliminates the need to ask why people disobey. It focuses solely on preventing deviation. This is why surveillance becomes dominant precisely when a ruling class loses confidence in its ability to justify itself. The watched subject need not be convinced. He need only be predictable. Mahmood’s enthusiasm is therefore not accidental. It is symptomatic.

Jeremy Bentham lost his argument in the nineteenth century because his vision was too naked. It required free societies to admit that they preferred obedience to dignity. Shabana Mahmood resurrects the same vision in an age of exhaustion, when liberty is already treated as a nuisance and privacy as an anachronism. She does not innovate. She merely completes. Bentham would have approved. He would have admired the efficiency. He would have applauded the absence of sentiment.

What he might have despised is the cowardice—the refusal to say plainly that what is being proposed is not justice, but conditioning. Surveillance is not the future because it works. It is the future because nothing else does. A ruling class that no longer believes itself legitimate will always choose the Panopticon. It is the last argument of power when all others have failed.

Mahmood is not the architect of this system. She is merely its most eager clerk.