Nannying tyrants
Monday, July 21, 2014 at 9:57 
Final word on last week's Freedom Dinner.
The speech by our principal speaker Brendan O'Neill has been posted over on The Free Society. Here's a taste:
What we have in the 21st century is not just an irritating, killjoy nanny state, but an utterly out-of-control bureaucratic imperative, an unhinged interventionist dynamic that has lost any sense of what areas of life it is appropriate for the authorities to intervene in and what areas of life the authorities should leave well alone.
We live under governments that relentlessly interfere in family life, in home life, in private life; governments which think nothing of telling parents how to raise their kids, or telling adults how to have sex, or setting out to reshape the masses’ behaviour and even our minds.
We live under a state that seems to think that individuals should have no internal moral life of their own. That isn’t quaint or eccentric or nannyish. We need to face up to the fact that the modern state has more in common with the Inquisition than it does with Mary Poppins. It’s worth thinking about all the stuff the state is doing these days.
It has banned smoking almost everywhere and it is always thinking up ways to make it harder to booze, too. It is banning junk-food ads, sweets in schools, and even packed lunches in some cases, so little does it trust parents to feed their kids in a proper, state-approved way.
The editor of Spiked (he's also a columnist for The Big Issue and The Australian) concluded his speech by saying:
We’re really letting them off the hook when we call them nannies; they look to me more like tyrants, or they certainly seem to be possessed of some pretty tyrannical instincts. What we’re really witnessing is the unravelling of the Enlightenment itself. The Enlightenment was based on the idea that individuals should be free to carve out their own moral and spiritual path in life without being hectored, harried or “corrected” by their rulers.
As John Locke said in his letter on toleration, one of the earliest documents of the Enlightenment, “The care of souls does not belong to the [state]… every man’s soul belongs unto himself and is to be left unto himself.
This is the real fight we have on our hands today – not a fight against a bunch of annoying nannies, but a fight against the attempted colonisation of our souls by a state which thinks, wrongly, that it knows better than we do ourselves how our lives should be run.
Great stuff. I urge you to read the full article:
Why nanny should become the new 'N' word (The Free Society)
Reader Comments (2)
Brendan is an excellent writer and commentator. I read his articles in Spiked all the time and some of his work is certainly powerful stuff.
I just wonder, however, how long it's going to take, if ever, before the political class realises that political tyranny is not a vote winner. But then, as has been said on many occasions, they are addicted to such an approach and seem unable to stop. Also, they are totally scared of public health which has become the biggest tyrant of all.
I subsequently propose that all politicians and doctors should all be forced to wear the same drab green uniform and have health warnings tattooed on their foreheads.
Well said that man! Wish it could be sent to our esteemed? leader!