Just when you thought that the Canadian elections had brought to power people making some claim to be ‘conservatives’ (and therefore, perhaps, taking individual liberty seriously) along comes a new draft law which inter alia makes you a criminal if you post on your own site a link to a site said to have ‘hate’ material on it:

“Clause 5 of the bill provides that the offences of public incitement of hatred and wilful promotion of hatred may be committed by any means of communication and include making hate material available, by creating a hyperlink that directs web surfers to a website where hate material is posted, for example.”

The point here is not this latest sly little erosion of liberty and personal responsibility in itself (which, if one wanted to be fair, is aimed at nailing eg people who spread child pornography or extreme racist material to each other). It’s the underlying attitude revealed.

As Mark Steyn puts it:

At the tail end of the Cold War, I used to meet charming, intelligent eastern Europeans and wonder how they could live as they did. How could an educated citizenry not chafe under daily tyranny?

I remember one of them – an amusing Hungarian cynic – explaining it to me: For most people, "rights" are theoretical. After all, how many rights do you actively need to avail yourself of to get through the day? To do your job, buy some dinner, watch a little TV. Maybe "free speech" is a big deal if you want to be a poet or a playwright, but for the rest of us, not so much so. And he gave a Mitteleuropean shrug.

I was aghast. But I wouldn’t be today. Why not criminalize the hyperlink? After all, as that Hungarian might have said, how many hyperlinks does the average Canadian need to get through the day? What does one more concession to statism really matter?

… We need more speech, more liberty, not less. If this law passes, I shall break it as a point of principle. A hyperlink is not an act of approval, but an act of sourcing: It says to the reader I trust you to go to the source and make an informed judgment.

In denying that freedom to the citizen, the state couldn’t be more explicit in its contempt for you.

Which, by the way, is also why Harry Cole in his noisy attack on Polly Toynbee arguably misses the point in proclaiming that there is no ‘progressive majority’ in the UK.

What we and most of the Western world have is a culture of collectivist utilitarianism which ‘most’ people either support (implicitly or explicitly) or unthinkingly accept. This means that on almost any issue the babble comes forth, almost literally every minute of the day, "let the government do something".

Just listen to BBC Radio 4 or Radio 5 Live or Question Time for a few minutes, chosen at random. The presenters and guests and public alike unite in defining the issues in collectivist, non-libertarian terms.

The effect is to reinforce the supercilious paternalism of the ruling castes of politicians and civil servants and assorted Quangos and NGOs who together define ‘public opinion’ for the rest of us.

Yes, if given a chance in referenda the British public might well go populist and vote for leaving the European Union and/or restoring the death penalty and/or ‘cracking down’ on immigrants – conventional ‘progressive’ arguments here could get flattened.

But they don’t get given that chance. And in the meantime there is an inchoate but hard to deny majority acceptance of the principle that when in doubt the state should ‘ do something’ in response to each and every problem life throws up. 

Plus of course it doesn’t matter when the state messes up. The answer is always the same: More State.

This afternoon I heard someone on BBC radio urging more powers for social workers to take children from problem families : "we need to re-professionalise the profession!" Scary shades of dour Yugoslav communist ideologist Kardelj?

Remember when the LibDems used to talk sense about Labour? Thus:

In total, the Government has brought in 3,023 offences since May 1997. They comprise 1,169 introduced by primary legislation – debated in Parliament – and 1,854 by secondary legislation such as statutory instruments and orders in council.

… Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, who uncovered the figures, said:

"Nothing can justify the step change in the number of criminal offences invented by this Government. This provides a devastating insight into the real legacy of nine years of New Labour government – a frenzied approach to law-making, thousands of new offences, an illiberal belief in heavy-handed regulation, an obsession with controlling the minutiae of everyday life…

And after a year in office of our new Coalition Government, how many of these odious measures have been repealed? Yes, probably a few, here and there.

But enough to make a real difference and roll back that Labour onslaught against us in so dramatic and brutal a way as to warn off future collectivists? No way.

Mark Steyn:

None of these people is qualified to tell you how to live – or whom to link to. Yet they will. Because to them it’s entirely natural to do so, regardless of which party is in power.

And, on those rare occasions when a nominally right-of-centre party finds itself with a parliamentary majority, enough of its members are inclined to string along. There’s so much of this stuff around it’s barely "ideological": it’s just the zeitgeist, the air we breathe, isn’t it?

Quite. And as Pink Floyd put it, you have to breathe it in:

Breathe, breathe in the air
Don’t be afraid to care…

Run, rabbit run
Dig that hole, forget the sun
And when at last the work is done
Don’t sit down
It’s time to dig another one

For long you live and high you fly
But only if you ride the tide
And balanced on the biggest wave
You race towards an early grave