A custard pie for Big Brother

George Orwell's 1984 had a context; he was writing it in post-war Britain where the tendency to, and consequences of, totalitarian control were obvious to most people. In a very different genre J R R Tolkein developed a similar theme.

The society I in which I grew up in the 40s and 50s was very tightly controlled but held together as much by social convention as government regulation, although there was plenty of that. We had food rationing, restricted shop hours, no sport on Sunday, restricted pub opening times and the BBC controlled the airwaves. For a number of years there wasn't much grumbling - "mustn't complain" was the guiding principle, but things began to open up in the 1960s and for someone of my generation this was the right reaction against the stifling environment we had inherited. It took a generation to move away from that monolithic society but it did happen.

Nobody wants to go willingly back to those days but it does now appear that government does want to return to the days where almost everybody did what they were told. We have had a decade or more of increasingly prescriptive and regulatory government spending millions (no billions) on wild technology schemes that they imagine will bring us all under control. Ironically every one of these schemes has failed to achieve its objective and has turned ordinary citizens into an anarchic frame of mind.

So John Redwood, who has remained wisely silent during the expenses disclosures, is right to make this observation:

I have often written about how much many people hate the bossy, autocratic snooper government which has damaged our freedoms in the last decade. We hate the cameras, the road blocks, the hectoring public advertisements, the multiplying army of regulators, the aggressive tax collectors, the enforced political correctness, the thought police, the concrete blocks around Parliament, the spying on our rubbish bins and the stealthy approach to making us all have Identity cards. Government, both national and local, has become a bunch of snoopers who know how we should all live and know where we live.

The Big Brother state always fails. There are dozens of examples in our recent history. Eventually people tire of it and rebel and I think, along with John Redwood, that this is fueling the anger and resentment against the MPs. At the moment the public are in a mildly anarchic mood - a custard pie in the face perhaps - but unless the government shows itself capable of reforming Parliament, the mood could degenerate into something worse.