The pursuit of happiness

26 May 2007

Boris Johnson issues a clarion call against the new Puritanism of the coming Brown era, in which risk, pleasure, bunking off, poetry and all forms of play will be imperilled

It does not take much imagination, if you look at the recent explosion of legislation, to see the fiscal disaster that follows. There is a new law, for instance, against the import of Polish potatoes (Lord knows why: I thought we had a CAP). There is a law that says you must appoint a local key-holder if you install a burglar alarm. Whatever the rationale of these edicts, they require monitoring and enforcement; and enforcement means officialdom. It means, inter alia, a new race of burglar-alarm invigilators and publicly funded potato prodders poking around in our supermarkets in search of rogue Polish potatoes, and new officialdom means an increase in public-sector spending, to the point where 60 per cent of the employment in Newcastle is now in the state sector, and while that is electorally valuable for Labour it means higher taxes for everyone else.

The paradox, therefore, is that Puritanism leads to profligacy; and the only way we can supply Gordon with enough money to satisfy his Puritan obsession with regulation and control, is to scamper ever faster on our hamster wheels and thereby attempt to satisfy his Puritan obsession with work. We work ever longer hours to service the interest rate on our mortgages, an interest rate pushed remorselessly higher, incidentally, by the markets’ suspicion of the expansion of the public sector.

We work so hard, in fact, that we completely forget the point of our work, and we drift in a daze from the Tube or the train to the TV set, pausing only to raid the fridge, and British children become so obese and generally stressed that the government is now driven to the demented expedient of introducing ‘happiness’ classes in school, and thereby leaving less and less time in the curriculum for anything that is truly happiness-inducing, such as the study of Aristotle or advanced mathematics.