Mick Hartley

Nick Cohen on form in the Observer:

Last week, a young NHS psychiatrist, who blogs under the pseudonym Shiny Happy Person, described how she ‘was just taking five minutes out, enjoying the sunshine in the surprisingly pleasant grounds of my new hospital, when the flowerbed spoke to me’.

She went on to reassure her readers: ‘No, I’m not neuroleptic-deficient. Other people heard it too. One moment, all was quiet and the next a disembodied voice was bellowing from somewhere in the vicinity of the begonias. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t actually addressing me and I know this because it said, “This is a no-smoking area. Please put your cigarette out. A member of staff has been informed.” I gave up smoking six weeks ago. But, really, how Orwellian is that?

‘The smokers looked understandably alarmed, glanced furtively around and then scarpered. I can’t help questioning the wisdom of installing a talking flowerbed to tell people off in the grounds of a psychiatric hospital, of all places.’ […]

Their hectoring is hardly novel. Last week, we had example after example of British bureaucrats, grown fat on extra powers and extra funds, using an ever-more audacious authoritarianism to hide their manifold shortcomings.

As psychiatric patients were fleeing from talking begonias, the Metropolitan Police threatened to use anti-terrorist legislation against climate-change protesters at Heathrow, even though the demonstrators were not, in fact, terrorists. A few days earlier, the West Midlands Police and Crown Prosecution Service had referred Channel 4 to the media regulator, Ofcom, for exposing Islamists who preached hatred of unbelievers and called for homosexuals ‘to be thrown off mountains’.

As Joanne Cash, a distinguished libel lawyer, said at a meeting in defence of the programme makers, the police and CPS have ‘no power and no jurisdiction’ to censor investigative journalism. ‘They have overstepped their powers into the realm of freedom of expression.’ […]

I suspect the overbearing streak in government is going to get worse. As Labour’s public spending increases slow down, the incentive to lash out will grow among institutions such as the NHS and the police which need to conceal how much public money they have wasted.

More insidious is the notion that people can be forced to be good. If you are a puritan, you can believe we would be a happier society if cigarettes and alcohol had never been invented. If you can close your eyes and sink into the daydreams that there is no need to protest about climate change or that sexist, racist and homophobic preachers are the invention of the media, you will be happier still.

Any assault on freedom becomes justifiable if it will help lead us to a clean-living, conflict-free, multicultural Utopia. The shrieking from the flowerbeds is only going to get louder.