Better safe than free

Excellent article in today's Sunday Times by Simon Jenkins.

Voltaire and John Stuart Mill insisted there should be an ideological chasm between disapproving an act and wanting it halted. In modern Britain this chasm has become a skip and a jump. Whatever we dislike we require the government to ban...

...There is a case for educating the public to eat, drink and smoke less, drive more carefully and not to rampage through town centres at night. But there must be a limit to the translation of disapproval into repression.

We really do seem to be sleepwalking into a totalitarian, health-and-safety-fascist society.