Manifesto Club Thinkpieces put our campaigning in broader perspective, exploring the underlying dynamics behind the state regulation of public spaces and informal life.
This Thinkpiece by Manifesto Club director Josie Appleton explores the growing hyperregulation of everyday life.
There should be large parts of life – in the streets, in our homes, and in informal life – where people organise things among themselves, and set their own rules, and the state intervenes only in the cases of violations or crimes. Over the past 20 years, state regulation has spread into everyday life, meaning that we increasingly conduct ourselves according to official codes or rules, or are subject to criminal orders or penalties for carrying out everyday actions.
In summary, the trends are:
1. Criminalisation of everyday life
Increasingly, everyday actions – such as feeding the pigeons, playing ballgames, or standing in a group – are criminalised. Public Spaces Protection Orders (PSPOs) mean that there are now over 2000 new legal codes banning many thousands of everyday activities, including bans on sleeping in public or on playing music. Activities are being criminalised that do not harm anyone, and do not cause significant public nuisance. A ‘crime’ is defined downwards to something more trivial: rather than meaning something that seriously interferes with others, it becomes something that annoys or offends, or has a ‘detrimental effect’ on their life.
Personalised legal orders (such as Community Protection Notices or Civil Injunctions) impose personal legal codes upon people, meaning that somebody could be fined or even imprisoned for an anodyne action such as entering a prohibited area, looking at their neighbour, or sleeping in public.
There has been a blurring of the distinction between crime and non-crime, such that a homeless person sleeping on a bench, a busker, and a shoplifter all get the same punishment. The criminal law is being drafted in to deal with everyday social problems. Homeless people have been imprisoned for sleeping rough or begging. People suffering from mental health issues have been issued with legal orders forbidding them from talking to family and friends if they felt suicidal. The definition of everyday life as criminal or potentially criminal means that all areas of life become open to state direction, surveillance and punishment.
2. Licensing of everyday life
Another form of control is to require people to ask permission or apply for licenses before carrying out everyday activities, such as busking, handing out leaflets, or charity collection. In some councils people have to pay up to £200 to hand out leaflets in their town centre. In the past, anybody could put up a stall in a town or city centre to seek public support or to raise funds. Now, most councils require you to apply in advance, book a slot, and often pay a fee. In some areas residents have to submit their leaflets or campaign in advance for council approval and vetting. Councils often require risk assessments and public liability insurance for any public activities, including fundraising licences or a ‘tables and chairs’ licence for a stall.
Under covid, the vaccine passport became in effect a medical licence required to access parts of cultural life. The criminal records check has become the ‘safe adult’ licence that must be obtained before helping out with children or volunteering.
The role of licensing is to mean that certain everyday actions are only allowed with official permission, after you have filled in a form and sometimes paid a fee. The state is posing as the de facto property owner of everyday life; we can only act on its terms and with its permission. Some city centres (and indeed some whole towns) are sold off to private companies, who then assert their complete right to control (and require a fee) for what people do within it.
There is a new crime of the unlicensed activity, where someone is fined not because they have committed a crime, or caused nuisance, but merely because they did something (eg handed out leaflets) without consent.
3. Codification of everyday life
Another form of control is the codification of everyday life, such that our conduct is guided by artificial rule books or codes. Speech codes tell us what words to use, child protection codes tell us how to conduct ourselves around children, with rules for the way we stand, touch, or talk to them. Here, decency is not about good intentions or respect for other people: instead, to be a good person means to obey formal behavioural rules. To use your common sense, or act spontaneously, is seen as ‘unsafe’. ‘Safe touch’, ‘safe sports’, ‘safe campuses’ or ‘safe sex’, all mean areas of life that are conducted according to official rules.
The use of certain words (regardless of intention or meaning) becomes subject to control and sanction, and different (artificial) words are proposed as alternatives. Both our free relations, and also our free judgement, are held to be toxic and dangerous.
Under covid, the state specified how far we should stand from people, how often we could meet, and the number of people or family groups who could meet. These rules had little epidemiological logic, but they expressed very clearly the idea that free actions led to infection, while restrained actions were considered clean and safe.
This form of regulation is in some ways the most pernicious, because it gets in your head, on your tongue, and changes the way you stand in relation to other people. It means that our interactions are stilted and artificial, and the state becomes the third party or mediator in every sports club and classroom.
4. Arbitrary power
Just as everyday freedom is restricted and restrained, so state power is seen as an essentially benign and positive force. While community is undermined, street wardens and officers are given increasingly arbitrary powers to impose restrictions or to issue fines, in the name of ‘protecting communities’.
Increasingly, social improvement or social care take the form of giving officials more powers or increasing legal orders and fines. It is through the power of coercion that the state purports to tackle problems such as homelessness or mental illness, or seeks to make areas nicer.
While our everyday relations and actions are restricted and rule-bound, the actions of officials are increasingly released from all procedural control or codification. Many of the new powers require no evidence or proving of a case before they can be used (still less a proper legal procedure in which the person has a right to a defence). Officials can use dispersal powers to bar you from public spaces, and once they give you a form it is a crime to return. Officials can stand on your doorstop and write out a legal order which then becomes legally binding. Some PSPOs give officials the power to order you to stop doing something – whether it is cycling, swimming, skateboarding or drinking – after which it is crime to continue.
While our freedom is seen as dangerous, the freedom of state agents is expanded at every step, and the further expansion of state power is seen as the primary thing that can be done in the public interest or for the public good. While parent volunteers or teachers are barred from touching young children to guide or comfort them, police officers carry out full body searches on over 100,000 children a year, and strip searches on 3,000 children – all in the name of public safety.
For officials, restrictions such as needing to go to court, or gather evidence, are increasingly seen as an unjustifiable restrictions that waste their time, and they seek ‘quicker, easier’ powers that avoid such processes.
This means that everyday life is subject to a generalised tyranny, such that even if there is not a legal order, or a licence, or a code, you could still be asked to stop what you are doing.
This expansion of arbitrary power is presented as the route towards civility and decency, as an antidote to the ‘anti-social behaviour’ of neighbours and fellow citizens. Yet the truth is the opposite. We are left, not with civility and social order, but with the cowboy conduct of the petty official, who reprimands and lords it over people. You don’t know who or what they will target next; you don’t know when you will be ordered to stop whatever you are doing.
We are left not with politeness but with rudeness, not with community but with hostility, not with order but with chaos and anarchy.
Defending everyday freedom
The state takeover of everyday life is affecting the way we think, the language we use, and the way we relate to our fellow citizens. If you are issued with legal orders telling you what you can do in your home, the sphere in which you should feel comfortable and safe becomes a zone of coercion and threat. If we cannot carry out public activities in the streets, they are not our streets, and we are not citizens – just subjects who are given permission to travel from a to b or to the shops, so long as we do not try to do something without permission.
If we cannot have a reasonable conversation with our neighbour, to negotiate everyday conflicts or disagreements, and can only talk through the medium of council-issued legal orders, then we cannot relate to others or resolve problems for ourselves. Whenever we face a problem, we must reach for the hotline or official complaint form: they are our adversaries rather than fellows with whom we share a common world.
The state’s proper role is to identify and prosecute defined crimes – theft, abuse, assault, or criminal damage, where one person’s actions interfere with the rights of another. It is not to supervise the sleeping spots of homeless people, or tell arguing neighbours they can’t look at one another.
The state also has a role in the provision of services, and practical support – services that are being withdrawn, whether that is for homeless people or those with mental health problems. Rather than issue fines for urination and constantly ‘move on’ homeless people, local authorities could open free public toilets. Rather than issue legal orders and take homeless people to court, they could provide some hostel beds.
Coercion is fast becoming the primary state service. This is a waste of public resources as well as being socially destructive.
The truth is that only free everyday life can be the source of civility and social order. A city street is made pleasant by the things people do within it. A busker on a busy crossroads makes a dull spot beautiful: their music is a gift, and you thank them with a donation and a kind word. To be free is not to lord it over people, to poke them in the eye – it is to enter the space of free relations, where we negotiate and associate with others, and assume the pleasures and responsibilities of citizenship.
It is only when we are free that we can feel the warmth and vibrancy of a life lived in common, and this can inspire us to public actions.
The current consensus holds that freedom is barbarism, and the state is civility. The truth is the opposite – it is today’s state that is barbarism. Rather than letting the state sink us more and more into barbarism, we must hold the line, and defend the spaces within which we can be free. This is the only way in which our everyday lives can be the source of pleasure, elevation, and respect.