The Nanny State
Sir: Congratulations on your timely and hard-hitting front-page editorial. If only others would bestir themselves to speak out with equal vigour in defence of out liberties !
The ethic?1 case against the Bill is even stronger than you suggest. To restrain somebody by law from attempting or committing suicide cannot cause them physical harm, whatever mental torture may result. Seat belts, in contrast, can on rare occasions be the actual cause of injury or death (the, Society is compiling a detailed dossier 01 such cases, together with those where lives have been saved by the non-wearing of belts, and would be glad to receive firsthand examples from Spectator readers). The correct parallel, therefore, is not with the banning of suicide, cigarette smoking, mountaineering, rugby football or whatever, but with a hypothetical regulation ordering the compulsory immunisation Of the entire population against an epidemic. The lives of many who might otherwise contract the disease would be saved, but at the cost of the lives of those few who hapPen unwittingly to be allergic to the vaccine in question. To 'protect people from themselves compulsorily is tyrannical; to do the same at the risk—however infrequent—of killing some of those allegedly 'protected' is not only tyrannical but immoral.
Monson Society for Individual Freedom 55 Park Lane, London W1
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