Banning ‘harmful’ adverts? Rage, rage against the dying of common sense

them – conform to O’Sullivan’s law: any organisation that is not explicitly Rightwing will become Left-wing over time. Most people accept that these bodies have a role in stopping advertising that wilfully misleads or hoodwinks the public, or in ensuring that inappropriate content is not broadcast to children. But should they be acting like philosopher-kings, determining what is good or bad for adults?

The regulation of corporate speech has become a veiled attack on free speech itself. Ludicrously, an advert for Costa Coffee was banned for urging customers to buy a bacon roll rather than an avocado because it “discouraged the selection of avocados”, and the coffee chain was told not to “condone or encourage poor nutritional habits”, a recipe for misery if there ever was one. An advert for Ford was banned, meanwhile, for apparently encouraging dangerous motoring when it contrasted the aspiration and freedom of driving a Mustang with life’s quotidian frustrations, set against a reading of Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”.

There is a unifying worldview behind these examples: that people do not have the wit nor the ability to make up their own minds. We are feeble victims who need to be prevented from making bad decisions and protected from irresponsible corporate power. We are, in effect, children. And if we look back in a decade or so and wonder how a nation of sophisticated consumers ended up with a far-Left Corbyn government, part of the blame should be shouldered by the irresponsible bodies that implicitly endorsed his own infantilising agenda. Rage, rage against the dying of the light, and the technocrats who extinguished freedom.