Nanny state sneer used as smokescreen by diehards

CAN’T offer you a lift today. Sorry. My car is out of commission. It has to go through its National Car Test later in the week.

So, this morning, it went into the garage, where the mechanics will do a search-and-fix in order to identify and rectify any flaws before the Government mechanics get to do their search-and-fail.

Like the smoking ban in pubs, the NCT is inconvenient, puts me out in the cold and takes away a long-cherished entitlement. God be with the good old days when we had the right to drive a clunker if we wanted to drive a clunker, just as we used to have the right to force other people to inhale our leftover cigarette smoke. Life is getting very tough.

Before the NCT, we lived a life of untrammelled vehicular freedom. The brakes of the clunker might fail, causing us to hit another car. Its malfunctioning signals might mislead another driver, causing them to hit another car. Its rotten insides might cause toxic emissions, causing neighbouring asthmatics to wheeze.

But weren't we all happier, back then? These days, we have the Government micro-managing everything, right down to the smallest squint in our headlights. Same as they're divorcing two inseparable pleasures, the pint and the fag. Joined at the lesion, those two have always been.

What kind of a country are we creating, at all, at all? Two answers to that question are possible. The first is that the Government we elected to improve our lives is actually doing it. The second is that the Government is turning Ireland into a nanny state.

In spite of the fact that nannies have never been a major part of Ireland's child-rearing dramatis personae, the nanny state gibe is getting a lot of outings at the moment, particularly from people unwilling to face up to the evidence that passive smoking in the workplace kills. It's a "don't bother me with the facts, let's skip to the smear" debating tactic.

The British Tories started the nanny state accusation. Well, they would, wouldn't they? Most of them pre-war, at least were raised by nannies who made all their decisions for them, forcing them to wash behind their ears and eat up their porridge.

This seems to have rankled with upper-class kids right into adulthood, and so whenever attempts were made to improve the lot of the poor, those attempts were immediately denigrated by reference to the gratuitously bossy (and female, never forget) nanny.

Early on, the nanny state accusation was levelled at those trying to clean up the coal-smoke over Britain's industrialised cities. The campaigners knew that letting the sunshine through the coal-induced darkness at noon would prevent slum children getting rickets, the bone-softening ailment that gave them bow-legs for life and reduced their stature. The opponents of this patently positive move, by calling it a nanny state initiative, sought to distract public sympathy from real children and portray it instead, to quote HL Mencken, as "a kind of crusade against the simple joys and conveniences of modern life". The nanny state taunt is a way of avoiding coming to terms with a radical shift in the way we understand public health and private behaviour. Public health used to be a matter of fighting off killer diseases by vaccination and clean water. Government was merely a provider of services. It had no mandate to modify behaviour regarded as a person's private business.

Once it was clear that personal behaviour can threaten one's own or someone else's life, that had to change. So governments began to insist on car seat belt-wearing, demand that motorcyclists wear helmets and ensure that smokers don't indulge their habit in the workplace.

The insurance companies are going further. Young drivers can now get a reduced insurance premium by having an electronic monitor installed in their car to not only alert them to when they're exceeding the speed limit but keep a record of each infraction. The monitors inculcate safer driving habits. This benefits the driver, the common good and the insurance company. This is nanny insurance and a very good thing, too. There are no losers. But of course, it's voluntary. It's not imposed by the State. So that's all right then.

Or is it? If an electronic carrot-and-stick can develop behaviour that will prevent death, disability and higher healthcare costs, shouldn't the State incorporate that approach into our tax system? Maybe. Maybe not.

FIGURES came out last week in Britain suggesting that the current fashion for polished wood floors has caused a massive increase in domestic falls and their cost to the health service. Since Tony Blair's government is already talking about taxing fats as a way of tackling obesity, should they also look at taxing dangerous floors?

(We're on a slippery slope here. Not to mention the fact that, next in line for taxing, if this logic is applied, are high-heeled shoes, also implicated in large numbers of falls. I'm thinking of opening a contingency savings account to cover that possibility. No matter what it costs me, I'm sticking with four-inch heels.)

The next decade is going to be dominated by the debate about how far governments should go to prevent behaviour that, by virtue of its eventual cost to the Exchequer, can be interpreted as a crime against the state. It's an important debate. About individual rights versus the health of the economy. About individual responsibility versus personal choice.

And it won't be helped by tossing in that old nanny state chestnut any more than the debate about equality is helped by that other stinker: political correctness. If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, the phrase political correctness is the first refuge of the bigot. The slogan is a smart-ass shorthand to cheapen genuine efforts to create a civilised society. Like nanny state, it is used to trivialise, rather than defeat by honest argument.

The two phrases are a double-whammy characterising egalitarians and public health advocates as meddling, impractical, pious do-gooders. They are subtle demonstrations of a deep disrespect for human rights. They are the language of the new ruling class, as lamentably illustrative of ignorant contempt as Marie Antoinette's "let them eat cake" retort to the complaint that the pre-Revolutionary poor in Paris had no bread.

Like "some of my best friends are Jews" they imply that the user is unprejudiced, while still seeking to roll back the hard-won rights of groups or individuals.

It wasn't political correctness that led our society to stop describing some of its members as "illegitimate" because of the circumstances of their birth. It isn't political correctness when we don't employ repellent nicknames for people of a particular religion or colour. It's a fundamental of decent living to call people what they call themselves and to treat women and older people as equal citizens.

These days, the nanny state sneer is frequently employed by those reluctant to relinquish their right to make others inhale second-hand smoke.

The politically correct jeer, similarly, is employed by those reluctant to relinquish their right to be insulting to others an impoverished interpretation of free speech.

Both say much more about their users than their users realise.