In recent years a popular assumption has arisen in Britain that we are a nation of ‘curtain twitchers’ with an affinity for petty authoritarianism. This claim is usually supported by issue-specific polling: historic support for ID cards, contemporary backing for lockdowns, public health interventions such as smoking restrictions, or proposals to ‘Keep Children safe online’.
I suspect that it is partly because of this narrative that Starmer and the people around him believe that he can even entertain the banning social media platforms like X, breaking from liberal democracies like Canada (who ruled it out) and joining a club with Iran, Russia and China.
It was also probably what led him to the erroneous view that he could impose a compulsory Digital ID system onto the public.
But the idea that we British people love nanny, and wish to be ruled by her, does not match well with our recent history. In fact, it is often the case that we have resisted attempts by the political establishment to impose restrictions upon us. In the last two decades, Britain has repeatedly resisted elite-driven attempts to expand state reach into our lives.
‘The cult of compulsory mask-wearing was also less extreme here than it was in Europe and much of the United States’
Just look at how the Blairite national ID card scheme, which had already been established on the continent, was killed despite overwhelming institutional support in 2010. The 2007 anti–road-pricing petition, then the largest ever signed in Britain, was achieved in a media environment that was still overwhelmingly analogue, only 55% of Households had a broadband connection in 2007 and yet the online petition attracted 1.7 million signatures.
ULEZ has survived only through procedural entrenchment and will almost certainly be repealed by a future mayor or scrapped outright once the political cost is finally paid. The ‘bladerunners’ who illegally cut down the towers which support it are nevertheless often afforded a surprisingly sympathetic hearing in the press and among the public. If there is a comparable group elsewhere in the OECD – individuals engaged in outright criminal damage yet treated as a kind of moral cause célèbre – I am unable to identify it.
And of course, there is Brexit. This was a mass assertion of agency against every major institutional pressure point at once, government, Treasury, civil service, big business, academia, most of the media, and foreign allies.
In famously mutinous France, the result of the 2005 constitutional referendum on Europe – where the French voted against integration – was blithely ignored and overriden by the French Parliament. In Britain, following 2016, this course of action was ultimately not possible. Political advisors like Dominic Cummings warned darkly that politicians would not be able to leave the confines of the M25 without armed security if the result was not respected. That is not the behaviour of a population that ‘loves being told what to do’.
Alongside the idea that we love the nanny-state, Britain has come to be conceptualised as uniquely anti-free speech. Whilst it is true that we do not have the same iron-clad protections afforded to Americans in the form of the first amendment, it is wrong to say that Britain is internationally rare. Across Europe, politicians and celebrities alike are routinely fined or prosecuted for ‘inciting racial hatred,’ a category elastic enough to accommodate everything from genuine provocation to mere offence.
The recently departed Brigitte Bardot is a useful illustration: she was not fined once in passing but convicted repeatedly by French courts between the late 1990s and 2008 for remarks about Muslims and immigration that were deemed to constitute incitement to racial hatred under French law. Within the Anglosphere, nothing dreamt up by this government to restrict free speech is as hardcore as the proposals brought forward by the Australian government which is introducing maximum sentences of five years in prison for online communication which could incite hatred.
There are plenty of examples of freedom still flickering in the Britain of the 21st century. Our lockdown was nowhere near as severe as that of Australia or New Zealand. The cult of compulsory mask-wearing was also less extreme here than it was in Europe and much of the United States. We did not follow through with imposing vaccine passports, although this was entertained as an idea for far too long.
One thing that Britain is unique in, is how much Issues-based polling features in our political discourse. Westminster is drowning in polling companies who work with think tanks to mass-produce headlines using leading questions to find the right results. Many political journalists base their analysis on whatever the latest poll indicates and little else.
In truth, most polls tell us very little. Issue-based polling systematically overstates Britain’s appetite for control, because it measures low-cost, abstract value judgements from incentivised panel respondents rather than revealed preferences under real constraint; when policies move from survey hypotheticals to lived experience, consent routinely collapses (as we have seen with Labour’s disastrous digital ID plans).
Treating such polling as a mandate is also an insane way to make policy: it is the equivalent of taking out a mortgage or moving a pension based on a 15-second thought experiment, yet governments repeatedly claim this is sufficient democratic legitimacy for decisions with long-term financial and civil consequences.
The commentary class keeps insisting that Britain is addicted to being told what to do because it has misread its own recent history. The most aggressive erosion of ancient civil liberties happened under the Blair government, and because there was no immediate street revolt or populist surge in the polls, policymakers lazily inferred consent.
Britain, they decided, likes the nanny state. It does not. It tolerates intrusion until the costs become visible, and then it turns feral.
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