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Officious: Rise of the busybody state Paperback – 9 Dec 2016

by Josie Appleton (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars 5 customer reviews
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Product details

  • Paperback: 136 pages
  • Publisher: Zero Books (9 Dec. 2016)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1785354205
  • ISBN-13: 978-1785354205
  • Product Dimensions: 13.8 x 0.8 x 21.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 53,932 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product description

About the Author

Josie Appleton is director of the Manifesto Club (www.manifestoclub.com), which campaigns for freedom in everyday life, and is the author of dozens of reports about contemporary civil liberties. She studied sociology and politics at the University of Oxford (undergraduate) and the University of London (graduate). She worked as a journalist and editor for five years.

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5.0 out of 5 starsThis book is a great start and really needs to be read by anyone ...
By Sally on 26 Mar. 2017
Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
It is true that everyone has come up against the officious State. A few years ago my neighbour was arrested for putting grass clippings outside her back gate, next to the river, to compost. A practice her and all the other neighbours had carried out for 20 years. I heard a story just yesterday about people in hi-vis uniforms waiting for children outside school to drop litter, following them, lecturing them and putting their names in a database. When I was a kid any adult nearby who saw a kid dropping litter would just tell them off.

But it is one thing noticing these instances if a busy-body State and reacting to it in the moment. It is another understanding just how officious and all-encompassing it has become and working out how we might start to respond more constructively. This book is a great start and really needs to be read by anyone who cherishes freedom.
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5.0 out of 5 starsA MUST-READ!
By Penny, Nottingham on 22 May 2017
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
An AMAZING BOOK and such an interesting read! If you want to know why we've ended up being banned from everywhere, fined for everything, prevented from doing anything, harassed by officials, dictated to by 'procedures' and 'best practice', then THIS is the book to read! As a campaigner against dog bans, I have to say I found it so insightful and it explained how we have ended up with so many people's lives being made such an utter misery. I totally recommend this book to ANYBODY who is campaigning against officialdom, and the busybody state, and anybody who cares about getting their rights back from those who have hijacked them and taken away our rights and our voice.
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5.0 out of 5 starsState institutions have become hollowed out of their former legitimacy and meaning and state structures 'float like an oil slick
By Dr Jan Macvarish on 17 Feb. 2017
Format: Paperback
The book tries to capture empirically and theoretically the contemporary operation of the state in its relationship to us as citizens in the public sphere. Appleton takes as her starting point a new kind of state official - the badge-wielding warden, entitled to issue fines to members of the public who break often new rules such as playing music in public spaces, spitting, walking their dogs or feeding pigeons in areas where this activity has been prohibited.

These representatives of the officious state, she argues, represent a new form of political authority: that is detached from all elements of social interest. They don't represent, for example, a particular class interest, but are the third party which ‘rises up over established social forms’. State institutions have become hollowed out of their former legitimacy and meaning and state structures 'float like an oil slick' on top of society. A kind of pointless, self-generating expansion of activity which operates for its own sake. New rules are created, previously unlicensed activities come to require licences and then these rules are enforced by wardens or badge-wielders by issuing fines. The fines then pay for the recruitment of more wardens.

The book offers a convincing and recognisable description of the petty hyper-regulation of public life. It is provokes the reader to continually test real-life examples against its thesis.
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5.0 out of 5 starsPrescient study of how the new bureaucratic state is a threat to public life
By Jan Bowman on 19 Feb. 2017
Format: Paperback
This very timely analysis unpicks how our loss of trust in each other is encouraging the proliferation of new rules and regulations, and an army of people to enforce them. Appleton elaborates her argument through examining the role of the Orwellian-named 'community wardens': the anonymous busybodies in high-vis vests who patrol town centres nowadays. They always come in pairs. They can confiscate your wine on a picnic. They will issue on-the-spot fines for feeding pigeons or dropping cigarette butts. They're there to prevent begging, busking, and other activities which once were tolerated as part of public life. Today such things are increasingly being redefined as crimes, via another Orwellian invention, the Public Safety Protection Order.

We already have laws against harassment and threatening behaviour. But the new officials enforce laws which would once have been seen as intolerant and unnecessary. As Appleton explains, local authorities now have the power to ban all sorts of things via PSPOs, and they contract out the enforcement of these bans to private companies. Their power and lack of accountability diminish our autonomy.

In the past, if someone was sleeping rough on a bench somewhere, you left them alone; and if some kid was misbehaving, the adults around them would tell them off. But today we're increasingly apprehensive about dealing with strangers. Appleton explains how that declining civic sense has created a vacuum which is beIng filled by a new, bureaucracratic form of state. It has no tolerance or 'common sense'; it operates entirely by the rule book. And the implications for our sense of humanity, as well as for democracy, are alarming.

'Community wardens' are there to prevent people doing anything out of the ordinary in a public place.Read more ›
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5.0 out of 5 starsThe slow strangulation of English liberty
By Steven Shone on 2 Feb. 2017
Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
An interesting (if over elaborate sometime to the point of tortured) analysis of the busybody state in the U.K. The author seems keen to avoid any suggestion that our over mighty state is itself the cause and that its parasitical employees will naturally expand their powers unless resisted
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