On the first of May, 2010, at 5.57am I and a group of friends were pacing quickly down Longwall Street towards the High Street to see the May Day celebratory chants from the top of Magdalen College tower. We would have made it there for the 6am start, but for the fact that the road had been closed by police, who were adamant that we weren’t allowed past because the crowd was already too big. No amount of pleading on behalf of our American friends, for whom this was the only chance to witness the singing, nor the fact that we were the soberest there, having actually got up to go and see it rather than stay up all night, would convince the officers to let us through.

Welcome to modern Britain. We are living in a state increasingly concerned, not with the individual, but about the enforcement of rules and hell-bent upon the homogenisation of society into a single, controllable entity. A state in which no trust is placed in the concept of individual responsibility, nor any regard to individual circumstances, but where legislation is all-encompassing, and objectors are swept aside as illiberal, bigoted, old-fashioned, or simply attempts to cover up guilt. Symptomatic of this attitude is the tidal wave of ‘reforms’ which have been brought in to curb the extent of civil liberties: from CCTV surveillance, to ID card schemes, to wiretapping, to ‘anti-terror’ legislation, the tendency has been to view everyone with suspicion, to assume everyone guilty until proven innocent.

Take, as an example, provision for the elderly, and especially the provision of state nursing homes. Whilst they are important for families with low incomes, their nationalisation indicates a breakdown in family relationships; surely it should be the role of the children to look after their parent in old age, a responsibility to be accepted with dignity and love, rather than one to be handed over to the anonymous state. Again, take the creation of the ASBO schemes, responsibilities that should belong to communities and neighbourhoods in association with parents to the national police. Finally, consider the fact that almost two million children are growing up in families with no working adult, surviving entirely on benefits, and that one in six people aged between 18 and 24 are neither employed, studying, or in training. This is a generation that has in many cases lost all sense of either responsibility, or desire for success.

It is a favourite media cliché, the concept of the ‘nanny state’ in which we live in, and yet it is also revealing. Paying taxes and avoiding ‘wrong’, in the legalistic as opposed to the moral sense, are our only responsibilities; there is no imperative to do good nor follow our conscience - in fact it is actively discouraged. When we witness a crime, no matter how minor, we don’t intervene, we instead call the police; vast swathes of the population are criminalized by unrealistic speed limits or bans on widely taken and relatively harmless drugs.

With Nanny, we need never work for ourselves...

Whilst there are no easy solutions to these problems; paradoxically, Britain’s spiralling debt crisis may in fact help it. Reducing the deficit will necessitate cutting bureaucracy, simplifying the tax and benefits system, and reassigning responsibility - and thus power - back to the individual. We can save public finances, empower communities and re-incentivise people to try and actively improve society - and in so doing improve their own conditions.

Whilst the state is important, it does not equal society. However, to achieve lasting change we will have to rely on the next government to willingly give up power, and to take decisions likely to be unpopular in the short term amongst a mollycoddled population used to having all their decisions made for them.

Given the lack of personal integrity so far displayed by politicians, their legendary narcissism, and their marked preference for putting off difficult decisions, all of this seems unlikely. Until the political classes change, it seems unlikely that society will either.