You got a licence for that?

This week, UK prime minister Keir Starmer pledged to make communities safer by putting more police officers on the streets at certain times of day. This forms part of the Labour government’s wider plan to intervene more forcefully in community life, including bringing in so-called Respect Orders to clamp down on the ever more broadly defined category of ‘anti-social behaviour’.

This determination to police and regulate people’s activities is far from unique to this Labour government. Rather, it is part of a long-term trend in which the state is seeking ever more control over our everyday lives. This cuts against a much longer tradition of civil liberty. There should be large parts of life, on our streets, in our homes and in informal public spaces, where people are free to organise things among themselves. Spaces, that is, in which they’re free to set their own rules, and the state intervenes only in the cases of crimes and other violations of law.

Yet, over the past 20 years or so, state regulation has spread into everyday life, eroding our freedoms. Today, we increasingly conduct ourselves according to official codes or rules, or we are subject to criminal orders or penalties for carrying out everyday actions.

Indeed, in a very real sense, we are witnessing the criminalisation of everyday life. Increasingly, everyday activities, such as feeding pigeons, playing ballgames or merely standing in a group are being criminalised. Introduced as part of the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, so-called Public Spaces Protection Orders (PSPOs) have granted councils in England and Wales astoundingly open-ended powers to invent crimes, and to punish them. As a result, there are now over 2,000 new legal codes banning many thousands of everyday activities, including sleeping in public or playing music outside. Labour’s new Respect Orders will only further empower the authorities to criminalise hitherto unremarkable behaviour.

Activities are being criminalised today that do not harm anyone, and do not cause significant public nuisance. The very definition of ‘crime’ has been re-defined and trivialised. Rather than categorising actions that seriously interfere with others, criminal actions can refer to behaviour that annoys or offends, or has a ‘detrimental effect’ on their life.

Indeed, personalised legal orders (such as Community Protection Notices or Civil Injunctions, also introduced as part of Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act) impose personal legal codes upon individuals. These mean 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.

The distinction between crime and non-crime has been blurred. Someone busking can be treated and punished in the same way as someone caught shoplifting. 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 feel suicidal. The redefinition of everyday life as criminal, or potentially criminal, means that all areas of existence become open to state direction, surveillance and punishment.

Everyday life is not just being criminalised, however. It is also being subject to a licensing process. This means that people now have to ask for permission or apply for licenses before carrying out everyday activities, from handing out leaflets to collecting for charity. 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 campaigns 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.

The role of licensing means that certain unremarkable 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. Indeed, there is a new crime of unlicensed activity, where someone is fined not because they have committed a crime or caused a nuisance, but merely because they did something (for example, handed out leaflets) without consent.

Another form of control is the codification of everyday life, whereby our conduct is guided by artificial rulebooks or codes. We have speech codes to tell us what words to use, and child-protection codes to tell us how to conduct ourselves around children, including rules for the way we stand with or talk to children. Here, decency is not about good intentions or respect for other people. Instead, to be a good person now means to obey formal behavioural rules, from using the prescribed language to adhering to the correct ‘safeguarding’ protocols. To use your common sense, or to act spontaneously, is seen as ‘unsafe’. The phrases ‘safe touch’, ‘safe sports’, ‘safe campuses’ or ‘safe sex’ all designate areas of life that are now to be conducted according to official rules.

Officialdom’s power over our everyday language is particularly pronounced. The use of certain words (regardless of intention or meaning) has become 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.

The codification of everyday life was writ large during the Covid pandemic. The state effectively specified how far we should stand from people, how often we could meet and the number of family and friends who could gather together. These rules had little epidemiological logic, but they did express very clearly the idea that free actions led to infection, while restrained actions were considered clean and safe.

This codification of everyday activities is in some ways the most pernicious form of state regulation. That’s because it gets inside your head, on your tongue and changes the way in which you physically and mentally relate to other people. The state becomes the third party or mediator in every sports club or classroom, and our interactions are rendered stilted and artificial.

At the same time as our everyday freedom is being restricted and restrained, so state power is increasingly presented by our media and political elites as an essentially benign and positive force. While community is undermined, street wardens and officers are being given arbitrary powers to impose restrictions or to issue fines – all in the name of ‘protecting communities’.

Increasingly, politicians view bans and punishment as a solution to social challenges. They invariably give officials more powers to intervene in everyday life or to increase 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 certain urban 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 do not require the authorities to provide evidence or prove 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 a crime to continue.

While our freedom is seen as dangerous, the freedom of state agents to regulate and punish is expanded at every step. The interminable expansion of state power is cast as ‘progressive’, as something that is always in the public interest or for the public good. So while parent volunteers or teachers are barred from comforting children if it involves physical contact, police officers carry out full body searches on over 100,000 children a year and strip searches on 3,000 of them – all in the name of public safety.

For officials, requirements to go to court or to gather evidence are increasingly seen as unjustifiable restrictions on the exercise of their powers. They see the need to prove a case as a waste of their time. They seek instead ‘quicker, easier’ powers that avoid such processes.

As a result, everyday life is now subject to a generalised tyranny. Even if there is no legal order, or licence, or code, you could still be asked to stop what you are doing. Yet rather than being seen as an authoritarian menace, this expansion of arbitrary power is presented as the route towards civility and decency – an antidote to the ‘anti-social behaviour’ of neighbours and fellow citizens.

The presentation of the state colonisation of everyday life as a civilising force is a reversal of the truth. We are left, not with civility and social order, but with the cowboy conduct of the petty official, who reprimands and lords it over the public. You don’t know who or what these officials 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 official rudeness, not with community but with state hostility, not with order but with the chaos and anarchy of power exercised arbitrarily.

We need to start 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. We cease to be citizens, and become mere subjects, 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 over 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. It means that whenever we face a problem, the first impulse of too many is to reach for the hotline or official complaint form. The people we live alongside are cast as our adversaries rather than fellows with whom we share a common world.

The state’s proper role is to identify and prosecute defined crimes, where one person’s actions interfere with the rights of another, such as theft, abuse, assault or criminal damage. It is not to supervise the sleeping spots of homeless people, or tell arguing neighbours that 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 serious 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 and is socially destructive.

The truth is that the only source of civility and social order is freedom. A city street is made pleasant by the things people do within it. A busker on a subway 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-spirited actions.

The current consensus holds that freedom is barbarism, and the state is civility. This is the wrong way round – 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.

Josie Appleton is director of the Manifesto Club.