This is how 2011 and our civil liberties limp to an end. With a supposedly arty chair in a shop in Lewes being accused of falling foul of the Obscene Publications Act.

Look at what is going on here.

A woman designer of this tedious piece of furniture has decided to adorn it with naked women taken from old Playboy magazines. So much for the feminist argument that such images ‘degrade’ women – even trendy women designers like them, to the point of wanting male and female buttocks to crush down upon them!

But lo!, a ‘member of the public’ saw the chair in the shop window – and complained to the police!

Worse. The police did not tell the member of the public to get a life. They moved into action.

Think about that. You’re walking along past the shops in earnest, self-important, middle-class little Lewes, and you see something you don’t like. You are not content to shrug and put it all down to living in a free society. Nor is it enough to walk on and not buy the stupid chair. You don’t want the possible embarrassment of going into the shop to argue with the shopkeeper. So you outsource all responsibility and urge … the state to act.

Then the state acts. The police take this stupid request seriously enough to go along, no doubt keen on looking at the chair themselves. They rummage around in their modest brains and find something which covers the case (they think), namely the 1959 Obscene Publications Act.

No matter that the act is intended to cover (a) ‘obscene’ and (b) ‘publications’, neither of which obviously apply in this case. The shop was then ‘politely’ asked (by whom) to remove the chair from the shop window. Which, according to the Sun, was done. What would have happened if the shopkeeper had ‘politely’ refused, asking the police to get out of the shop and mind their own damn business?

Is this a stunning example of crass state oppression, nothing being too small or fatuous to avoid heavy-handed police intervention?

Or is it even worse, namely the state asserting to itself the right to lean upon anyone when someone claims to be ‘offended’ or insulted? Where exactly is free speech in that?

Or is it all these things plus jolly British seasonal eccentricity, and a chance for the bored policepersons of Lewes to get away from filling in forms and ogle a chair with boobs..?

2011 has exhausted its possibilities. Next year, please.