As Palestine thugs desecrate war memorial state fails us yet again - Robert Taylor

My God, have we really sunk his low? Have we really reached this pit of mindlessness? When a bunch of thugs, who, in truth should be given a vigorous shake, if not more, clambered on the Royal Artillery Memorial in London and started waving Palestinian flags “because it is not illegal”. 

We must finally realise the crushing damage of our obsessive reliance on the Big State.

The new Home Secretary James Cleverley wants action against these selfish oafs. He is, we’re told, considering giving police new powers to protect monuments from hooligans who possess such utter disregard for those who gave their lives to keep us free.

Good on him, we might say. But I’m filled with despair that he even needs to consider such a thing. 

No, it’s not illegal to disrespect a war memorial. And it shouldn’t darn well need to be. It should be so obviously unacceptable that nobody ever dreams of it. 

And in any decent society it would be. But we don’t live in such a society. So the Government needs to intervene. That’s how low we have sunk.

Yet we only have ourselves to blame. All of us have become fat and lazy in our passive acceptance of the Big State and its dominance over just about anything that happens to us.

And what an irony that this appalling behaviour in central London should happen the very week that David Cameron took up his duties at the Foreign Office. 

Cast our minds back 15 years, and we recall Cameron’s big push for the Big Society – a desperate attempt to encourage people to take responsibility for their own communities rather than a knee-jerk reliance on government.

But Cameron was whistling into a gale. 

Even then, we were so used to handing over responsibility that we treated the whole Big Society as a gigantic yawn. If anything is going to get done it should be through the Government, we said. We pay our taxes and deserve to sit back and wait, we declared. If there’s anti-social behaviour, we’ll just call the police, we agreed. The result? The Big Society was a big flop. It was abandoned in 2014 altogether.

Since then, as night follows day, the Big State has ingrained itself further and further in our lives. Personal responsibility? Forget it. During lockdown the Big State told us when to “stay home”, when to go out, who to meet and when to clap. And we loved it. We begged for more.

So, the Big State gave us Big Tax: the highest levels since the second world war. And it gave us Big Intrusion, telling us what we can and can’t say or do. Take cigarettes. They are evil little blighters. But shouldn’t we work that out for ourselves? Oh no, the Big State has to tell us. So, what next, will the Big State ban us from consuming more than 14 units of alcohol per week, because we’re too passive and stupid to work it out for ourselves? And once that happens, how about sugar and carbs?

Bit by bit, ban by ban, health-and-safety initiative by health-and-safety initiative, the Big State trains us to assume something’s only bad for us if the Government tells us. And it trains us only to regard something as unacceptable (like disrespecting a war memorial, for God’s sake) if it’s illegal.

In short, we have created an infantile, anything-goes society. People are behaving like infants, because there’s nobody to tell them not to, until the Government comes along. 

Well, it’s not illegal, is it? So, we’ll do it till some copper pleads with us not to. And even then, we’ll ignore him. Coz we can. Coz those horrified bystanders are addicted to the Big State and won’t do anything. Coz Big Society’s last hurrah was a decade ago.

What a hideous indictment of our country. Cultural norms no longer exist. We are zombified and wedded to Big Brother. Fifteen years on, not only is the Big Society dead, but so is the Small one.