Tuesday, 11 April 2006
If you can spot it, you can stop it
I can do little more than urge you to take a look at Guy Herbert's comments, over at Samizdata, on this new government ad for something called "Bullywatch London", which is captioned "If you can spot it, you can stop it":
What this campaign is for is to get people to report incidents they think might be bullying to the authorities. There is a website and a subsidised telephone line for you to do so. [...] The point is to get members of the public to adopt official attitudes, and engrain them by providing a mechanism to rehearse, to act out, concern. It is to prove you are a compliant member of society by watching others carefully and reporting deviant behaviour. The state will deal with the problem, however minor, however fleeting, however apparently amenable to personal decision.
For those of us - left and right - who still hold to the western liberal tradition of individual moral responsibility, this is a sickening, vertiginous conception of social life. The life of ants, not human beings.
