Call the cops

The thought police terrify me. The idea that they can listen in on the insane/inane twitterfeed going on inside my noggin and then persecute me for it is gut achingly scary. Well it would be if they existed outside the paranoid rantings of people like perennial victim Melanie Phillips.

Melanie seems to think that exposing her opinions on life to millions of people, who then point out the gaping holes in the logic, logistics or efficacy of them, is the same as having some secret state sponsored Derren Brown types reading your brains by magic or lasers or something. It's not, she's only being persecuted by the shadows in her mind that tell her the world's after her cash or wants to build windmills in her back garden.

In her column this week this victimhood mindset led her to say this:

Nevertheless, it is remarkable that, at the very least, it is becoming possible to have a debate about these propositions. For the terrible fact is that, until now, such a debate has been impossible because the Left-wing intelligentsia has ruthlessly shut it down.

This is true of a wide range of issues — such as immigration, multiculturalism, man-made global warming, equality and anti-discrimination laws, overseas aid and many more — on which only one viewpoint is permitted.

Maybe her paranoia is gin fuelled, maybe she had a bang on the head or maybe as she got more successful and earned more money she was angry about the pounds she was giving to the tax man when she could have been spending them on aga cookers and anti-wrinkle cream - we'll never know. However what is certain is that she writes this nonsense without any thought about the realities of not what you can or cannot say, but of what has actually been said.

Spend ten minutes looking on the Mail and Telegraph website for the topics that Mrs Phillips insists have been shut down by the paramilitary mind readers and you'll find that the unspeakable is being spoken to around 2.7 million people daily.

Immigration

 Multiculturalism

Global warming

 Equality / anti-discrimination

 Foreign aid

So this means one of two things; either the Metropolitan Mind police are so incompetent that - never mind stopping you thinking dangerously subversive thoughts - they can't even stop people writing down these ideas and then flogging them off to 5% of the British public at less than a pound a day.

Or more likely Melanie Phillips can't bear the idea that on some topics what she says is just total shit and, having said it out loud, people have the right to point out what a load of shit it is. Tweet