The beginning of the end of free society

From The Yorkshire Post

Who would be a fireman at the beginning of the 21st century? In Glasgow last year a watch manager was demoted and eight of his colleagues officially warned for refusing to hand out safety leaflets at a gay pride march through the city. Needless to say they all had to undergo intensive “diversity training”. In Plymouth firefighters, as we must now call them, weren’t allowed to slide down a pole at their new fire station because of “health and safety” concerns – God forbid that health and safety discover they have on occasion to deal with a blazing inferno. And during the World Cup last summer, firemen in Hampshire were ordered not to fly the flags of St George that were fluttering across the nation because they might offend other nationalities.

This is what we all recognise as political correctness, a frightening political phenomenon that is sweeping across the country; frightening because although we’ve all heard of the term, we all use it, what we can’t do is vote for it.

We didn’t vote for new laws making children of up to 12 sit in car seats. We didn’t vote for the cameras that photograph us 300 times a day. We didn’t vote for a government to ban smoking. No one voted for that matter, for smoking cessation officers.

And certainly no one voted for that essential cog in the running of our country – the five-a-day-co-ordinator.

Yet here we are with thousands of these people ready to tell us off us for not eating our greens. For the first time since Oliver Cromwell, politicians seem to think they have the right to tell us how we should behave.

The anti-social-behavioural order – the ASBO – is surely emblematic of the society in which we live today. It is at the heart of what we all recognise as the nanny state. Firstly, that the government feels it can boss us around like this, and secondly that we as a society are so immature that we have to be treated like children.

We have battalions of a new breed of functionaries – let’s call them the meddling classes – setting themselves up on huge salaries to convince us that they are essential to our wellbeing. The likes of school travel-plan advisers, people team-managers and partnership coordinators stalk our town halls ready to set up rafts of guidelines and joint action committees to boss us about. The sort of people who come up with the Dad Pack, launched this year at a cost of £50,000 to impart such wisdom to potential fathers “not to have affairs” while their wives, sorry, “partners” are pregnant.

And we should be very afraid of them. In four states in the USA, there is a three-drink rule in pubs and bars. Enforced voluntarily now, but for how long? In Texas nanny can send police into bars and arrest drinkers who have had one too many on the basis that they might commit an offence. A spokeswoman for the commission that decided this was the proper way to police society, one Carolyn Beck, declared: “People jump off balconies trying to reach a swimming pool and miss.” Happens all the time, Carolyn.

We see in this country these stories every day in which some busybody is protecting us from ourselves. An old man lobbed off the bus in Cardiff, because he was carrying a can of paint. It was, of course, a “hazardous article”. You can hear the bureaucrat saying in the drear voice of the official, “We take the safety of our customers very seriously”. A mother and father with three children turned away from a swimming pool in Bridgwater, Somerset, because only one child per parent was allowed.

And there are hundreds of thousands of these busybodies competing to be ever more self-righteous. Between 1998 and 2005, there was a 680,000 increase in the number of public sector jobs – 524,000 of which were in the fields of health, education and social work.

In the nanny state, the bureaucrat is on the ascendant just as it was in Socialist Russia and Nazi Germany. Communism was never about the proletariat, but an army of functionaries who in the interests of the state were there to stop you thinking for yourself. Even worse was the network of household spies who could win favours by sneaking on their fellow citizens, for, say, oh propagating anti-revolutionary ideas. Want a better house? Shop your neighbour. Now in England and Wales next year there is to be a smoking hotline to report smokers to the “authorities”. The authorities, indeed!

Most of us would prefer a hotline to report a burglary, or an assault – we used to have one by dialling 999, but it doesn’t work any more.

Then again, can we really expect it to when the police’s paymasters at the Home Office go on courses where they’re being asked to look into beardism and note their reactions to facial hair?