As of 2015 an Englishman or woman's home is no longer their castle. The state now has at least 266 justifications for legally entering your home including action under the 2006 Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies Regulations – in order to prevent the spread of BSE. There’s a whole list of reasons why the state can legally barge its way into your home. This would have been unthinkable even 30 years ago.
To give you an example of how intrusive and punitive the state has become I’d like to tell you about Robin Lee, a London-based artist, who this week plugged his iPhone into an electric socket on a train and was reported by a Police Community Support Officer for ‘abstracting electricity’. For non-UK readers, a PCSO is a not very bright and usually quite short quasi police officer with an attitude indirectly proportional to their height. When the train stopped at the next station the man was arrested by three real policemen but was then ‘de-arrested’ before being promptly ‘re-arrested’ for having an ‘aggressive attitude’. Frankly I’d have an aggressive attitude if some latter-day Hitler Youth had tried to get me arrested for using an electric socket and having an attitude. The man was eventually released without charge – in both senses of the word.
What I’m trying to get at here is that the state and officialdom has become a spiteful, overbearing, punitive force in our lives that seeks to frustrate and spy on us at every turn. Why weren’t there lots of charging sockets on the train? Why was the state’s first instinct to punish the man for ‘abstracting’ electricity? Why has the state and its commercial cronies become such bullies? Why can’t authority seek to serve us instead of making us subservient to it? Isn’t that exactly what those Russian’s were being accused of back in my 1960s childhood?
To end, I’d like to quote the great historian AJP Taylor who wrote this following piece on the matter. I crave your indulgence for so doing:
‘Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police.’