John Sweeney takes on North Korea and... not a lot happens

After all the hype and protests from the powers that be within the LSE, their students cruelly duped so that we may learn more about the secretive society that is North Korea, the result was a bit of a damp squib (or squid, as a friend insists on saying). The ethics of John Sweeney's methods have come under fire, not least from my own wife, who, as an academic, visits trouble spots in the Middle East on a regular basis, and is of the view that he did indeed endanger the other members of his party, and by implication puts other purely academic travel groups in jeopardy also.

I'm a big fan of first class under-cover reporting: it can be one of the best ways to reveal the truth when that is being denied by normal methods of investigation. But, having compromised the safety of a number of more or less innocent students, the result, shown on Panorama on Monday night, was scarcely earth shattering. Sure he found out that North Korea is a country ruled by fear, where no one, except those have fled the tyranny and are living in safety in the West, is prepared to say a word against the regime for fear of being dragged off by the thought police. But we knew that already. For me, there were just two points of real interest in Sweeney's film. The first was when they visited a gleaming new hospital that remained, for reasons unknown, completely shy of patients. The reason given was that the patients had all been treated that morning and had now gone home. That makes it radically different from any hospital I know of anywhere in the world. That, or someone was lying.

The other moment was when they visited a library and Sweeney asked if there was a copy of "1984" to be had. Of course there wasn't. But it showed that the same thing must have occurred to him as it has to me for some time: that the set-up in North Korea is the nearest  equivalent to the oligarchical society proposed by George Orwell in his great book: the state controlling every aspect of people's lives, right down to shaping the thought processes of the ordinary individual. That's what is wrong with North Korea, and John Sweeney did little to add to our sum of knowledge on that score.

All we can hope is that a society like that is inherently unstable, and that eventually, like Assad's regime in Syria, it is bound to come tumbling down as the people find the power to oppose it. Good luck to you the people of NK: you'll certainly need it!