A super, sharp little analysis by Frank Furedi of the way the state appropriates responsibilities and then redistributes them, wrecking almost every value we ought to hold dear in the process.

Look at this devastating passage::

… the public has become a project, a project of inclusion.

New Labour loved having these projects. So every museum would start saying ‘we’re showing fine art, but we’re also spending millions of pounds on including the public’.

The moment the public becomes a project that you seek to include artificially, it acquires a fantasy-like character. Hence, virtually everything we say about public engagement – counting the numbers, checking whether the voter turnout has gone up by two per cent since last time and so on – all represent this kind of fantasy of trying to create a link that really isn’t there…

So therefore the idea of empowering the public is a contradiction in terms: power is gained, not granted. When you ‘empower’ people, you’re not empowering them, you’re enfeebling them.

I have been invited to submit evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons who are looking at the FCO’s role. Can I face it?

I can see it now. They’ll work hard to produce an honest, meticulously honourable report to which the FCO will respond in a carefully reasoned letter making all sorts of defential noises, and precisely nothing significant will change.

One of the issues which they ought to talk about but won’t is the culture of government as it applies to the FCO, especially the way that ‘safety’ has emerged as a cultural über-value relegating almost everything to a distant second.

Where does it come from? I don’t know. But it was certainly alive and well in the early 1990s under a Conservative government, when I ranted from Soviet Department about a Health leaflet produced by the FCO’s Welfare Department which had pictures of trees showing how there were smaller shadows when the sun was high, thereby warning about being out too long in the midday sun.

What, I screamed, as I grappled with the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union, was the FCO doing with public funds in writing and circulating material suitable for children in nursery school?!? 

Later when I was trying to get the Ambasador’s Residence in Belgrade redecorated after years of neglect I encountered this lunacy:

One idea we had was to remove the vile dark sticky polish and ugly carpets from the original nice woodblock floors and go for a lightly coloured, varnished modern look. But when we asked for this to be done along the upstairs landing we met: "what if a child skids and shoots up and over the landing and plummets down and dies?!"

We asked for the kitchen to have something other than industrial strip lighting, to make it a more pleasant place to work. "What if one of the cooks is ill and cuts himself and drips infected blood into food being prepared for a member of the Royal Family?!"

Work began to replace the nasty tin sentry box for our local staff Serb security team with a small brick building. I happened to stop by and asked why the roof was such a fatuous design. "It is being made of reinforced concrete. What if terrorists attack and try to break in through the ceiling?"

In each case I had to order them all to stop being ridiculous and come to a calm, elegant solution. Had I not done so the taxpayer probably would have had a worse and more expensive outcome.

Yet countless stupidities are not stopped. How does one cost this mess?

This is nothing less than a form of mass mental illness, a collective retreat from intelligent responsibility, a civilisational curling-up to suck thumbs and float away in a fleecy blanket.

Except that it’s anti-civilisational, since civilisation is all about dealing with risk, not airbrushing it from real life.

Look also at the FCO’s detailed instructions to Ambassadors on How to Emote:

If more than a handful of British citizens look to have been involved in a ‘serious incident’ (Note: defined at a very low level, eg a motorway car pile-up with say five deaths) the Ambassador personally is expected to drop everything (CAP reform, Climate Change, Terrorism) and go straight to the scene.

Once there he/she is expressly instructed to deploy the 3 Ps:

What the public expects to hear from you/your spokesman/Minister/official after a major incident :

Pity:         sympathy for the victims and their families

Praise:      praise for/thanks to the emergency services etc

Pledge:     a promise/pledge to get to the bottom of what has happened –  and learn any lessons 

The grim fact of the matter is not that this sort of thing is revolting, stupid, morally ruinous or whatever.

It is that millions of people – including many diplomats in the FCO – have no idea what you are talking about if you say so.

If you demand high standards of spelling, presentation, dress, behaviour and analysis you’re being judgemental, putting them under stress, making unfair demands – you’re bullying.

Or gaze at you with a blank-eyed fatalism and change the subject.

I wonder who’s prospered on X-Factor this evening? That’s what really matters, eh?