The rise of Britain’s new nanny state

Nothing annoys a certain type of Briton more than the government standing between him and a painful death. The phrase “nanny state” first appeared with the introduction of a 70mph speed limit on England’s motorways in 1965. Iain Macleod, a former Conservative minister who invented the term, lampooned the transport minister responsible in the : “Why doesn’t he follow his own logic and…go back to where we started with a 5mph limit and the man with the red flag?”Macleod would not have enjoyed this year’s . Nanny has been busy. The Conservative government plans to make it illegal for anyone born after 2009 to buy tobacco, in a policy proposed on an apparent whim by Rishi Sunak, the increasingly presidential prime minister. There is no opposition. “It’s a good Labour policy, which I was planning to steal,” says Wes Streeting, Labour’s shadow health secretary.