Brian Monteith blames ‘puritans, control freaks and prohibitionists’, the ‘monstrous BMA’, ‘change merchants’, ‘politicians’, ‘small towns and countries’, ‘campaigning charities’, ‘newspapers’, ‘quangos’ and ‘lobby groups’ for turning Britain into a humourless ‘bully state’, so concerned with socially engineering the behaviour of its citizens that it has shrugged off its nanny persona and become a bully in the name of health and safety.

Scotland has led the way in Britain in finding new ways to undermine individual responsibility by intervening in people’s affairs, and Monteith is good at raging against the nationalist and green politicians who have used devolution as a launch-pad for further bullying. Monteith conducts successive attacks on policies on smoking, drinking, eating, surveillance and much else. As he goes he compiles a register of unlikely characters (lacking only the ‘rear admirals and queer admirals’ in Reggie Perrin’s secret army) whom he holds responsible for creating the Bully State.

A former Member of the Scottish Parliament and the founder of the Pie Club, he does a great job of tracing the early history of intervention in personal space and of ridiculing the consequences of risk-awareness gone mad. I inwardly cheered through the many sections of this short book that undermined the logic used to justify today’s hyper-regulation. But Monteith insists on holding certain social types responsible for the ‘end of tolerance’ and that flies in the face of evidence he presents of a near-universal urge to control society and its members.

Monteith skilfully rubbishes bans on plastic bags (Ireland now uses more), side-swipes compulsory safety belts (lower casualty rates are not linked to wearing safety belts) and calls time on plans to regulate alcohol sales (cheap and available booze on the Continent doesn’t result in binging); all the while he builds a convincing overall picture of an ever-more intrusive and controlling state.

News releases, dodgy statistics and bad science are used to hype risks in the media and public reaction is tested to see how far control of individual behaviour can be taken - only the most ridiculous kites will fail to fly. Clever ad campaigns sponsored by the government (or their ‘storm troopers’, charities), send out messages in support of proposed legislation while people in positions of responsibility all over the country, especially in local councils, rush to be the first to ban or control something. To Monteith’s great regret, Scotland has joined in the rush to be first to bully.

The transformation of the nanny into the bully is typified by the health awareness industry, says Monteith. As doctors ran out of actual biological diseases to eradicate, a secondary medical movement, geared toward changing behaviour, advanced from anti-smoking, to alcohol control and on to changing the way people eat. The campaigners never let up. The ‘monstrous’ BMA’ (British Medical Association) seeks to further ‘denormalise’ smoking with its demands that all advertising is banned and tobacco is taken from display and sold under the counter. He has a point - when did doctors become experts in media and field marketing? Read their recommendations and it is clear they have not.

Monteith demolishes the BMA’s arguments root and branch and it is when he directly challenges the claims made for one intervention or another, with information and humour, that The Bully State is at its most useful and entertaining. But his anthropomorphising of social pressures into a list of bullying ‘socialist’ do-gooders risks underestimating an important part of hyperregulation today.

While many grumble about the inconveniences of controls on their behaviour, they often basically support them. While most people believe they are capable of self-control and decent behaviour, they do fear the consequences of the unregulated activities of others. Monteith’s strength is in challenging some of the assumptions on which intervention in our personal decisions are based, but he is mistaken both to assume that most people are as hostile to intrusion as he is, and that it is necessarily the state that policies behaviour.

I would concede that the end of left/right politics has indeed cast many activists adrift in the sea of the lobbying and campaigning attention industries, but they are surely swimming with a wider current. 

Monteith’s hope is that people will ‘collectively fight for the right to live your life as you see fit without the overbearing weight of the bully state making every decision for you’. He’s made a useful contribution to that cause with The Bully State, but this is a fight where it’s no use trying to pick your opponents. Nonetheless, I wholeheartedly recommend this book and urge anyone concerned about today’s intolerant hyperregulation to read it. I hope Brian Monteith writes another, taking on more of the myths used to justify the spread of personal control and surveillance.