Please stop ruining literally everything.

Your ‘improvements’ are making life worse. Please. Stop it.

I don’t think we played board games by candle light. We weren’t that sort of family. But I do remember the candles, and the hunkering down, and the telly going off, though I could never work out how the phone still worked. I vaguely remember the ‘Three Day Week’, not that I knew what that was. But most of all I remember, everything was a bit crap.

Three TV channels. Boring food-a curry was mince and rice-but the mince had sultanas in it. And literally nothing was open on Sunday-maybe the garage-not much use to me though, you don’t often need a gallon of paraffin when you’re seven.

Holidays were sitting in the back seat of an Austin Maxi while we drove to Cornwall-from Essex- at a steady 50. My dad smoking a pipe full of Gold Block all the way. And then getting cross when we got car sick.

But slowly things started to improve. We got another TV channel, and it was brilliant. It had swearing and boobs. Sometimes at the same time. We could drive to a big, out of town supermarket, which sold literally everything. I got a racer bike and discovered cigarettes. So they sort of offset each other. And holidays got more exotic. Not foreign ones though. My dad wouldn’t fly.

Then it snowballed. Video recorders. Going to pubs. Getting my first motorbike. Working in London. The internet. Starlight Express. Polytechnic. Bill Hicks. Girls.

Everything was going so well. Cheap holidays. Nelson Mandela was free, mainly thanks to me and my pals shouting at the South African Embassy in Trafalgar Square. There was gay rights. Video games. Alcopops. CDs. Jeans that didn’t cost a week’s wages. A week’s wages. Blur vs Oasis. Buzzing down the A40 at 60mph on a 125. Even Tony Blair for a while. (I know I know).

Everything was getting better. Sure it wasn’t all sunshine and roses but the number of our choices was going up, and prices were coming down. Social mobility in the UK, while not brilliant, was a real thing.

Things were, on balance, if not great, at least heading in the right direction.

And then the meddlers took a look at all the little benefits we’d accrued since the 70s, all the tiny improvements, our small freedoms, little luxuries and choices, and decided to ruin it.

Now please don’t get me wrong. I’m not about to go on some nostalgia kick. Life really wasn’t better in the ‘good old days’. Things are better now. We live longer. (Not you America- where life expectancy is actually going down right now. Damn you Brexit!) We are richer-I know it doesn’t feel like it-but we are. We have more real choices. For the vast majority of people better what we used to call ‘life chances’. And even that nice Gary Lineker agrees that we are a tolerant, decent society .  Hardly anyone, (Shout out to Jeremy C) thinks that things were better in the 1970s. As a nation we have without doubt, progressed.

But there is a cadre of people who seem hell bent on taking all the progress we’ve made over the last fifty years, in the thousands of little ways we’ve managed to make regular people’s lives more fun, more mobile, easier and yes, more free. And somehow wrecking it.

I’m not talking about the big stuff like politics and economics, though they play their part. And this isn’t really about the culture war, though it certainly has an effect. This is about all those little everyday things that most people were broadly quite happy with. Things that worked. Ways of doing stuff that seemed to suit most people, most of the time, and how those things have been sabotaged by a class of do gooders and pearl clutchers who we have foolishly given licence, to meddle in our lives.

These busy bodying experts took one look at us plebs, and concluded that with the imposition of just a little of their boundless insight, lived experience and limitless virtue, they could make everything, and everyone, better, healthier, fairer and more moral.

But they couldn’t. Instead they have made everything a tiny bit worse. And anytime we had the temerity to point out that fact, they nodded sagely, and suggested a brilliant new solution; more meddling.

Whether it’s in the name of keeping us healthy or saving the burning (it’s not burning) planet. Or in the name of equity. Which sounds like equality but means anything but. There are a few areas of life where we seemed to be doing OK, until they decided to get involved.

You know what I mean, but I have a few examples. So let’s jump in.

Driving used to be a pleasure, it was fun. There were entire BBC TV shows dedicated to the essential joy of it.  Now every mile behind the wheel of your gas guzzling poison factory is a stain on your immortal soul.

Fifteen Minute Cities.  ULEZ zones. 20mph speed limits. Traffic calming measures. These are all explicitly designed to ruin your day by making a ten minute drive into a two hour nightmare.  Town planners and traffic experts used to have a clear mandate, to make it easier for us to get from A to B. Now their job is genuinely to make it harder.

Will these measures save the planet? No of course not. I know we want to feel we are an important country wearing big boy pants, but if the UK really did sink into the sea tomorrow, (Shout out to Greta) the world’s carbon emissions would reduce by only about 3%.

I know Sadiq Khan thinks he strides the world like a colossus . But sorry Mr Mayor you simply don’t count. All your Malthusian schemes are doing is making normal working people’s lives more miserable. So maybe stop calling us ‘far-right’ for wanting to drive our wonky hipped nanas down the shops.

People used to love to drive, especially men. But both men and cars are toxic now. So get the bus peasant.

Well if we’re no longer allowed to drive about, spewing evil plant food into the atmosphere, then we’d better get fit. Tone up a bit. Get on our bikes. Get healthy.

It’s not for everyone, but I like going to the gym. I’m no muscle man, I’m skinny and old, think Wilfrid Bramble on a Stairmaster, but I try to look after myself. Reduce my personal burden on the sainted NHS.  That makes me virtuous right? A Good Person. Nope. Going to the gym also makes me toxic. And not just toxic. But according to Vice, a right wing arsehole. Makes sense. After all, I tell you who liked people to keep fit-Hitler.

OK. So books. They can’t ruin books right? Wrong. And it’s not just Roald Dahl they’re intent on eviscerating . (I wrote about how it’s time to build yourself a bunker full of books here if you are interested) They’re not happy simply wrecking books that already exist. Their new mission is to ruin all the new books, before they’ve even been written.

Virtually every publisher is employing a legion of ‘sensitivity readers’,  petty pre-school pearl clutchers, joyless censors, vigilant to every bad word, alert to every accidental cultural appropriation. Ready to stamp out imagination, creativity and originality wherever they find it. Their goal; to improve literature by stopping any sort of wrong think ever making it to the book shelves in the first place.

In their world the casual reader is incapable of reading James Bond without either instantly turning racist, or melting into a puddle of quivering apoplexy when they discover that made up spies from 50 years ago didn’t share the same culture and social values as Owen Jones.

Even browsing a bookshop, something that used to be such a pleasure has instead become a penance. Walking in to any London bibliotheque is like walking into a Guardian reader’s wet dream. If you were a white person who stupidly imagined themselves non racist before you strolled in, there are buckling tables stacked high with material that will happily disabuse of that stupid notion. And if you thought that being able to buy stuff you liked at prices you could afford was generally a good thing, then fear not, there are shelves piled high with anti capitalist screeds ready to put you right. Forget Harry P. Read this. It’s Thomas Piketty. Educate yourself.

The internet used to be fun. All you needed was a phone line and a massive, room sized computer and you has a golden ticket to an ungoverned playground where you could be reunited with friends, hook up with your exs, book train tickets(?) and if you had the patience, even download a few racy pictures. Really. Really………………Really. Slowly.

But then the government realised that it had taken its eye off the ball and here was a part of everyday life, and an increasingly big part at that, that it hadn’t regulated and restricted into oblivion.

So out came the usual warnings that the place was crawling with pedos, foreign spies, drug barons and nasty ideas, to justify putting a lid on the whole thing. And now, as well as never ending annoying cookie consent pop ups on every single website, every single time you visit it, we have The Online Harms Bill. Yet another piece of legislation which seems to assume that people of this country only fit into one of two categories, Nazis, and babies.

Sure in the old days it was a gamble every time you put your credit card number into an online shopping site. And yes, cyberspace IS full of pedophiles. But then, so too are churches and Rotherham. And no one is suggesting you should need a government mandated digital ID card to enter either of those.

And it’s infecting all aspects of online life. Seek out a heterodox opinion on social media and get bombarded with misinformation warnings from official bodies whose sole purpose seems to be to spread misinformation. Or find yourself assaulted with invitiaions to learn more about COVID 19 on a music app whose main job was supposed to be uniting middle aged dads with Lana Del Rey albums.

The past isn’t what it used to be. History used to be a seemingly endless story book filled with daring deeds, breath taking adventures and patriotic heroes. Not any more. All our heroes are racist slave owners. And all the dead white men are simply not dead enough.

How dare people in the past have social or moral values different from people today? But holding people born three hundred years ago to the same standards as people born in 2002 makes literally no sense. And asking why Winston Churchill wasn’t more progressive is like asking why Mary Queen of Scots didn’t play more Playstation.

Also we’re told that all our history was uniformly bad, evil and nasty. Unless it involved a black person or woman. (Not you Thatcher.) Which is simply not true. When Nigel Biggar wrote a balanced book about the British Empire , which considered in a scholarly fashion the good, along with the bad, his publisher Bloomsbury dropped him. Not because he got his facts wrong, but because he told a story we’re no longer allowed to hear.

Museums are related but different. As we rid ourselves of the past, we’re not content with only turfing out the people, we’re also busily dumping all their stuff in a skip. Like clearing out an unloved, dead relative’s council flat.

The Welcome Collection once held a magical, bizarre collection of weird historical artefacts gathered over a lifetime by founder Henry Welcome. A visit to the Medicine Man exhibit was like rummaging  through Indiana’s Jones attic.

It contained an amazing pick n’ mix from history. Napoleon’s toothbrush. Florence Nightingale’s shoes. A bit of William Burke’s (from grave robbers Burke and Hare fame) actual brain.  And while many of the exhibits were mementos of a past most liberal thinkers would shudder to revisit, the collection as a whole brought history to life in a unique, creepy and profoundly enlightening way.  But it had to close because- colonialism. So now you can’t see it and make up your own mind. Which is better, apparently.

And it’s the same everywhere. No exhibition marking our nation’s industrial past is complete without an informative plaque offering a shrill scolding about environmental destruction and social impacts. Sometimes I think these people genuinely wish the Industrial Revolution never happened, and we were still living like the Amish, phoneless in our bonnets.

They’ve even managed to suck the little joy there was from a trip to the supermarket.  How many people have been rescued from morbid obesity by the inconvenience of moving the chocolate bars away from the self service tills? I’ll telll you. Exactly Zero. None. Nunce. It’s pointless posturing, the result of an overpowered health lobby with too much time on its hands and too little between its ears. The only possible health benefit are the extra steps you have to take to find where they’ve hidden the Haribo. It’s annoying.

And while we’re in the supermarket. You’re a grown up who wants to buy two packs of ibuprofen. But you’re not allowed. Why? Because you simply can’t be trusted not to go out into the car park, smash the lot and top yourself by the trolley rack. It’s infantilising. An old lady who works on the tills in Tesco is now in loco parentis to a 56 year old man with a sore elbow. How is that better?

English. The language of Milton, Austen, and Dan Brown is being reduced redacted and rated reactionary. Words are banned. Their definitions reclassified to mean the opposite of what they once meant. Democracy. Freedom. Woman. Language scrubbed bleached and denuded of value. Every phoneme banished as soon as it is examined and found guilty of implicit, accidental, or unintended racism. The point of language used to be to convey meaning. Now its sole raison d’etre seems to be to avoid any chance of giving offence.

If you have any doubt about the aim of the game here. Read the most boring, and best bit, of 1984. Where Orwell describes Newspeak and exposes how the systematic destruction of language, like we genuinely see today, is actually a political process, the ultimate goal of which is to expel hertrodox ideas from all discourse and make dissent literally unthinkable. It’s good. Double plus good.

And not only is English language suspect. The countryside has been judged irredeemably racist too. And even worse our cattle are now destroying the planet with  methane. First Winston Churchill. Now Gaia is a Fascist .

Fireworks. When I was a kid only posh people went to firework displays. The authentic way to enjoy bonfire night was to set fire to your garden and attempt to blow up your neighbour’s shed. Kids were scarred. Pets were traumatised.

Ok. Fair enough. We’ll give the kill joys fireworks. Good work the fun police.

I could go on. But I’m conscious of making these posts too long.

So let’s give honourable mentions to Sport. America. Holidays. Clothes. Movies. Phones. Scotland. Satire. Cities. I’m sure you have your own list.

All these things are having the joy slowly sucked out of them in the name of justice, equality and inclusion by people who for the most part don’t understand or care about any of those things. And I say that with confidence because each thing on that list is a human value, and if one thing is clear, it is that these do gooders, meddlers and improvers really, really, don’t like people.

They claim to be looking for solutions, to fix the world, to correct the wrongs inherent in our society but they are in fact nothing more than Malthusians. Their real problem is humanity.

The idea that people often like to do things just for the pleasure of the thing is an anathema to them. Telling them you’re going out for a drive would send them into a quiver. Saying ‘I fancy a big fat juicy steak’ would bring tears of despair to their eyes. Announcing happily that your flight to Lanzarote only cost you £49 would send them into spasms of tutting.

Because in their eyes it can all be summed up with a single assumption. These people are better than you. Cleverer than you, more moral than you. More virtuous and enlightened than you.

And this unshakable belief in their own superiority gives them licence to meddle with every aspect of our lives

(Anyone on the left who thinks yeah but the public are idiot gammons, or anyone on the right thinking yeah, but the proles really are all mindless sheeple. Well, thanks for coming this far, but I think this is your stop.)

We have created a cadre of meddlers who believe that our agency must be restricted and regulated, for our own good. We are weak willed so the flame of personal freedom needs to be snuffed out. We’re not to be trusted so the genie of personal responsibility needs to be put back in its bottle. We’re mindless idiots and so the spectre of personal choice must be exorcised from our lives by the holy High Priests of Nudge

Democracy is meant to be about giving people power. But instead of empowering the masses. We’ve only empowered these busy body elites. And they can’t help themselves but exercise that power in every petty way imaginable. A law here, a regulation there, ban this, restrict that, licence this, stop that, tax this, crack down on that.

We’ve handed our lives over to fearmongers and panickers, to box tickers and catastrophisers, to joyless regulators and pinch faced scolds.

They’re not destroying lives everyday. They’re just making everyday life more and more annoying.

If these people wanted to genuinely improve our lives they would start doing the jobs we actually employed them to do in the first place. Catch criminals. Keep inflation down. Provide a functioning healthcare system. Protect women from sex offenders. Control our borders.

Or perhaps, even follow the reasoned and well thought through national pandemic plan that had long been in place, rather than rip it up faster than you could say ‘Wuhan Institute of Virology’, at the first sign of a rogue virus.

But they don’t do any of those things. They are simply too difficult, too complex, or they come with too much personal or political risk. Instead they get to feel good about themselves by incrementally making your life just a little tiny bit worse, a tiny bit more annoying.

But those tiny bits add up. Until the observant can’t help the feeling that there is a class of overlords out there whose mission seems to be to take every single little thing about modern life that actually works, and ruin it.

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Thanks so much for reading this article. I genuinely appreciate your time.

I also appreciate there is an element of ‘old man yells at clouds’ about this post. But yell at clouds I must. Because these particular clouds are intrusive and annoying.

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Please share with me any of your experiences of parts of modern life, made actively worse by meddlers. As ever I will attempt to answer in kind, any good faith comments.

Thanks again!