Drunk on authoritarianism

Sometimes I think we need to retire the phrase nanny state. It has its uses. It’s a good shorthand. People know what you mean when you say it. But it rather downplays the activities of the control freaks and megalomaniacs who are hell bent on dictating how we should all live our lives. It makes them sound almost quaint, and ultimately benevolent.

The truth is quite the opposite. You do not need to be the sort who hysterically compares sugar taxes to something out of North Korea to realise that the preoccupation of the 21st-century state with policing what we eat, drink and do in our private time speaks to a depth of authoritarianism that is not at all normal – and upstream from more potent flavours of authoritarianism.

Logically speaking, if we are not to be trusted to dine unchaperoned, why should we be allowed to think, speak, even vote, for ourselves? There’s a reason why the same people who want to punish you for what you stick in your gob also want to punish you for what comes out of it.

Well, those people now run the country, it seems. Not only has this new Labour government embraced lifestyle despotism with a remarkable zeal – with plans to ban smoking in beer gardens, ban junk-food ads and weigh people at their workplaces already being announced – it has clearly emboldened all the joyless nags and bores of the ‘public health’ blob, too.

Labour is now floating the idea of curtailing licensing hours. Public-health minister Andrew Gwynne – apparently displeased that only 50 pubs a month are closing down at the moment – told the Labour Party conference this week that it’s time to consider ‘tightening up on some of the hours of operation’.

Labour has since slapped Gwynne down. ‘It is categorically untrue that the government is considering changing alcohol licensing hours’, a spokesman said. But I wouldn’t put anything past them at this point. Plus, chancellor Rachel Reeves is reportedly mulling over a hike in alcohol duty in her upcoming, doom-and-gloom budget, which would also be a hammer blow to the pub trade.

This is beginning to look like a vendetta – against an industry that was decimated by New Labour’s indoor smoking ban, put on life support by lockdowns and now facing the most puritanical government since Cromwell.

At least Tony Blair gave with one hand and took away with the other. He brought in the smoking ban a few years after he loosened licensing laws, ushering in the supposed horrors of ‘24-hour drinking’ – a hedonistic free-for-all that has regrettably failed to materialise.

And wait until you hear who is pushing behind the scenes for Labour to fully embrace the role of fun police. According to Gwynne, he was given a ‘stark’ presentation by chief medical officer Chris Whitty on his first day in the job – laying out the supposedly apocalyptic scale of the healthcare costs created by the public’s stubborn insistence on enjoying themselves.

That such claims are bunk – it has long been known that so-called preventative measures do not save on healthcare spending, because those who live longer, ‘healthier’ lives tend to cost the taxpayer more – apparently hasn’t stopped Whitty from continuing to inflict his alarmist slides on credulous ministers.

You may also remember Whitty taking to the airwaves to cheer on Rishi Sunak’s ‘generational smoking ban’ – an insane, illiberal policy that Labour has gladly inherited. Whitty has also, reportedly, been ‘leading the push’ for the outdoor smoking ban, after cabinet ministers began to wobble in the face of public backlash. Because this is precisely what you’d expect from an unelected civil servant offering his ‘impartial’ advice.

I dare say all those lockdowns have gone to the man’s head. Indeed, one of the regrettable consequences of the Covid years is that the chief medical officer is now a household name, apparently vested with the authority to dictate where we can go and what we can do when we get there.

Meanwhile, public-health cranks are throwing any mad idea at the government in the not-unfounded hope it might stick. There was an absurd piece of advocacy research published last week, arguing that abandoning the pint glass could reduce booze-related harms. Yes, banning pint glasses. An unthinkable act of national cultural vandalism that now seems all-too thinkable.

The killjoys are at least finally being honest about their intentions. For decades they insisted that crackdowns on smoking, booze and ‘junk food’ had nothing to do with puritanism or telling us how to live. It was about protecting non-smokers, protecting kids, protecting ‘our NHS’ and trying to curb the excesses of those who are gorging or drinking themselves into an early grave.

Now, all these pretences have been dropped. Now they are waving through the total prohibition of tobacco, which is what the ‘generational’ ban will eventually mean. Now they are going to stop you from smoking outside, even though it poses no risk to anyone else. Now they explicitly want to get everyone to wean themselves off the booze, not just the ‘problem drinkers’.

This isn’t about healthcare spending, or even really health. It’s about control. It’s about imposing the tastes and lifestyles of the sort of people you would never want to have a beer with, and who would probably prissily decline if you asked, on a reluctant nation.

I don’t know about you, but these are the last people I would want to be forced to emulate. People like Chris Whitty – a man who looks like he has never, knowingly, enjoyed himself; who looks like he contents himself with half a shandy at weddings and the annual pushing-together of him and his other half’s twin beds.

Ban by ban, nudge by nudge, we have ended up in a situation where the state feels there is no area of our lives that is outside its remit. That sees us as the objects of policy, data on a spreadsheet, rather than citizens free to think for ourselves, make our own decisions and carve out our own version of the good life.

Our leaders aren’t ‘nannies’. They are drunk on authoritarianism. And it’s high time they sobered up.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater