How long until anybody who dares write an article like this is dragged away in handcuffs?

He’s championed tolerance all his life. But now with a new orthodoxy that allows no dissent, our columnist asks chillingly...

flags are supposedly there to mark LGBTQ+ history month. But the real point of them is that they are everywhere, and also that anyone who tried to fly a banner of protest alongside them would be ordered, by authority, to haul it down. It may seem jaunty and cheerful, but only as long as it is obeyed and admired.

Like the banners in Nineteen Eighty-Four proclaiming ‘WAR IS PEACE’, ‘FREEDOM IS SLAVERY’ and ‘IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH’, they dare you to object, even by a twitch of the jaw muscles.

‘Go on,’ they taunt, ‘see what happens to you’.

Well, its defenders reply, so what? Nobody will put you in prison.

No, not yet, though they could quite easily force you out of your job and reduce you to penury, which is very nearly as bad.

But as we see so often, the police are quite keen to get involved in such matters, and I don’t think this is going to let up, despite a recent case in which a judge declared that ‘in this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society’. No, we haven’t yet. But we might.

Judges have made similar declarations before, but the police have continued (for instance) to arrest traditionalist Christian street preachers and the courts have found against such preachers.

They can see which way things are going.

Some sort of national emergency – a major terror attack, an economic collapse, perhaps even a devastating epidemic – will at some point speed up our descent into a semi-totalitarian dusk.

The Civil Contingencies Act already gives government astonishing powers to rule by diktat if it can think of a good enough excuse. Theresa May’s creation of the National Crime Agency gives State-appointed civil servants the power of arrest, a power normally reserved for constables sworn to uphold the law without fear or favour.

This is something all previous British governments have striven to avoid. Anti-terror laws have more or less destroyed the protection against being locked up for long periods without the authority of an independent judge. They have licensed the surveillance of opinions and permitted punishment for the expression of opinions in the clauses about ‘glorifying terrorism’. Juries have been gutted by the introduction of majority verdicts.

You think you’re safe? Wrong. A few years ago, the sackings of unfashionable academics and politically incorrect public sector workers, and the no-platforming of dissident speakers would have been absurd. Now they are reality.

And remember it was a Tory government which immediately gave in to a disgraceful witch hunt against the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, and Tory MPs who joined in the outcry when they didn’t even have to.

THERE is no barricade of law which stands between us and the introduction of an unfree society. There is no major party which can be relied to oppose such a change, provided it can be dressed up as being in the interests of ‘security’, of ‘equality and diversity’ or of not offending people.

The new societies of both Brave New World and Nineteen EightyFour begin with catastrophic wars after which people either no longer want freedom or no longer care about it.

For many years I have thought that Huxley’s predictions were coming true. We are well on the way to the abolition of parents, to test-tube babies, the annihilation of religion, literature, history and culture. We turn more and more to drugs to stifle discontent, though we are still some distance from Huxley’s Soma, created by two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists, and a huge state subsidy with ‘all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects’.

We have yet to abolish old age or end life by being compulsorily put down in scented dying rooms, stupefied into slack-jawed content by drugs and TV. But we are approaching both.

And we have created the throwaway consumer culture in which nothing is ever repaired, we constantly spend but never think.

Huxley’s tyranny was beguilingly gentle. Those who protested were drugged into simpering submission or in rare cases exiled to the Falkland Islands.

As he explained: ‘Government by clubs and firing squad… is not merely inhumane… it is demonstrably inefficient.

‘A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive… controls a population of slaves who do not

have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.’ I think of these words every time I am nearly knocked over by some zombie walking along while gaping at their phone.

Millions have opened the gates of their minds to the hidden persuaders of the World Wide Web, and are no longer independent, thinking beings.

Discontented? Worried? Don’t be. Ignore the world. Buy something, take a drug, watch this, listen to this. Do it now. Do not think.

The problem with Huxley’s new world was that it was too perfect, too rich, too expensive, and took too long to eradicate all those inconvenient things about human beings that make them so hard to govern.

And so we find we increasingly have Orwell’s apparatus of camera surveillance, and it is almost popular. We also have an embryonic Thought Police patrolling Twitter. And we have increasingly ferocious official lying – especially about who we are at war with at any given time. I never cease to gasp at the way in which the British public, told for years that Al Qaeda was our most dangerous enemy, is now urged to support the same people in Syria.

But both these nightmares have one thing in common – the erasing of the past. Hardly anyone under 60 knows what pre-revolutionary Britain was actually like, and broadcasters and film-makers are busily creating a new version of the past which millions believe to be true.

The 1960s world in which I first read those two books exists in my memory, but almost nowhere else.

The ideas they contain may soon be largely forgotten, too. Reading actual books is fast going out of fashion and I find, increasingly, that people worship them but have not read them.

How long before students all over Britain will note the appearance of rainbow flags each February, and think that it has always been so, and that there never was another opinion?