Welcome to the new bossiness

From Compass magazine

In September this year, the murder of a motorcyclist led to some 10,000 motorists to be stranded for eight hours on the M40 when police closed the motorway. Eight hours of crying children with no food or water; flights missed; family reunions in tatters; vital assignations that oil the wheels of society cancelled.

Murder isn’t to be taken lightly, of course. And what’s a bit of a delay when compared to the poor schmuck who was taken out on his motorcycle? Nonetheless, why eight hours?

Because of a new bossiness that has blown into every nook and cranny of modern British life.

By refusing even to consider using some of their workforce to get the traffic moving while they investigated the murder, the police were saying, simply, that their time was more important than everyone else’s. And so the self-importance of officialdom hung over the scene like a damp, miserable fog.

We’ve all been subjected to this low-level inconvenience. London streets are routinely closed on a whim due to an “incident”. We are never told what these incidents are – one suspects a hoody with a catapult – but we are meant to genuflect before the greater good of our police forces, who, while very good at scrambling helicopters, closing off public highways and rushing to the scene of a case of alleged racist abuse, are absolutely diabolical at apprehending, arresting and charging criminals.

And if we have precious little sympathy for the police nowadays, what about the whole new raft of professional busybodies whose purpose is to treat us like five-year-olds?

Local authorities have decided that we’re incapable of making any adult decisions without their moral guidance. They spend millions of pounds sending out smoking cessation officers and five-a-day-co-ordinators to boss us into eating what they deem to be a healthy diet. They litter our streets with railings and signs telling us to slow down, stop, not to stop, to drive carefully through the village. (Damn! And we were just on the point of seeing if we could hit 100 miles an hour by the time we reached the primary school.) And now they are to boss us about in our homes (it was only a matter of time). So microchips are to be in placed our bins should we dare to drop in the remains of our lunch and we are issued with edicts by the Royal Society for the Protection of Accidents pointing out the hazards of going about our daily in business at home – if you are thinking of running a bath without an official to help you, it’s best to know that you should “test the water temperature before getting in”.

This sort of bossiness has become so all-pervasive, we barely now notice it. On the Red Jet “Hi Speed” ferry from Southampton to the Isle of Wight, the stewardess, whose main purpose is serving up an overpriced mud with the description of coffee, precedes her little speech over the Tannoy with the dreaded words “for your comfort and safety” – always translatable for “our convenience” – by telling us to stay in our seats like good children.

Alcoholic drink brands meanwhile entreat us to “drink responsibly”. Or what? Can we expect the nation’s brewers and distillers to send in the goons and snatch the glass out of our hands should we have the temerity to go one over the bossy government guidelines telling us not to drink more than three units a day.

Look out for the health warnings that already adorn cigarette packets to appear on bottles near you soon. And as for smoking, it is now law for any public building to stick up a sign telling us not to at its front doors. How meaningless is this? Even in the Fifties, when it was de rigueur to have a fag on even while you cleaned your teeth, no one, but no one, sparked up in the churches which are now required to deface their ancient porticos with these ghastly civic regulation-sized signs.

But what more do we expect under a government that has introduced 3,000 new laws since it came to power in 1997? A new one from Environment Secretary Hilary Benn will force us to use ugly, expensive lightbulbs that watt-for-watt are about as illuminating as a rainy day in Bognor. The self-righteousness of our age, it seems, can only be realised by living in the half light gloom of Seventies Leningrad. And we know the terrifying results of what happened when the bossiness of politicians was applied there.