The new busybodies

The new busybodies can be found throughout social life. They are in the street in day-glo jackets, telling people that they should not play ball games or hand out leaflets. They are in institutions, enforcing criminal-records checks, drawing up safety signs or running diversity-awareness courses. They are in voluntary association or clubs, the child-protection officer or health-and-safety officer who fills in forms and invents new procedures with which everyone else must comply.

They have an identifiable manner. They are hawk-eyed, on the lookout for some minor infraction, for somebody who has used 'inappropriate' language or failed to draw up the requisite risk assessments and policy documents. They view the world through dubious and suspicious eyes: most people, they think, are up to no good. And when they discover a violation they draw themselves up: they have a tone which is talking down to you, but quite unlike the tone of those in positions of traditional moral authority. The tone of the busybody is sanctimonious – you have 'failed to comply' or committed 'unsafe practices' – but without the moral weight and grounding of a defined social position. They are uppity and hectoring, shrill with jabbing fingers. People who have been fined by a busybody often say that they felt humiliated, and indeed the exchange appears geared towards their humiliation.

The officious are quite distinct from public-service officials, whose raison d'être and authority is derived from the public: the things people want, the problems they face. Whereas public-service officials seek in various ways to meet public needs, the officious tend to obstruct people's activities, introducing rules that make life more difficult. Rather than representing the public will, officiousness seems rather to be the negative of the public will, not aiding and providing but restricting and stifling.

It is for this reason that these new officials are often rude and derisory. It is not uncommon for florescent-jacketed busybodies to swear at people or to be generally dismissive and disrespectful. One man was followed and called a 'pain in the ass' when he refused to pay a fine for litter he had not in fact dropped. The officious ignore the usual dispensations accorded to the elderly or mothers with young children; they issue their fines and reprimands with an egalitarian disdain. Mothers have been fined when their child dropped a small food item, elderly people for feeding the birds or unwittingly walking their dog in the wrong area.

Aside from this derisory manner, it is difficult to sum up the qualities of the officious in any positive terms. They have no particular beliefs, no ethical orientation. They are not religious or humanitarian, right or left, working-class or elite. They seem to come from nowhere and have no ties or loyalties to any particular social group.

It is easier to say what they are not. They are not like the traditional English police officer, representing interests of state and middle classes in facing down a riot or breaking a strike - while at the same time being the local bobby who gives directions and takes lost children home. Nor are they like the French gendarme, the representative of the state as military force, bound by esprit de corps and set against a potentially mutinous population to whom they relate as might an army of occupation. The officious do not seem to represent any particular social interests, either popular or interests of state and 'public order'.

Nor are busybodies like traditional bureaucrats. Bureaucrats, as Max Weber says, were defined by their 'precision, steadiness, and, above all, the speed of operations'. Bureaucrats were loyal to their office, to the function dispatched without delay or favour, with a swift click-click. The drive of the bureaucrat came from the social necessity of his tasks, the standardised operations necessary for the workings of a modern society. The officious lack this social necessity and so lack the accompanying discipline and precision.

In fact the busybodies who patrol public spaces often wear ill-fitting jackets and seem to slouch. They have nothing like the policeman's hat or gendarme's cap, which in an earlier era were treated with such reverence that it was thought mutinous crowds would quail at the mere sight of them. The new officials tend to wear a black fleece or a fluorescent jacket, with a badge and perhaps a camera around their neck. This uniform is indicative. They are representing no particular authority, but are a sort of generic 'authorised person'. Their power is not in a symbol or uniform but in the badge they flash at you when issuing a fine. The florescent jacket has become the new 'authorised person' uniform, to the extent that it is used as a cover for heists and stunts.

The first Metropolitan police officers were distinguished from the lackadaisical parish constable by their 'perfect command of temper'. In joining the police, a 'wild young fellow' became 'a machine, moving, thinking and acting only as his instruction book directs': 'an institution rather than a man'. The individual became part of a bureaucratic machine, subject to strict orders and lines of command, every morning lined up and given their brief.

By contrast the new officials' behaviour can be random and unpredictable. They lose their cool and shout at people, or get into an argument, trying it on, then walk off. They seem alternately coasting around doing nothing then haranguing people and bothering them. You don't know what they are going to do next. Because there is no particular professional brief, they seem to pick on the things that annoy them personally or on people to whom they have taken a dislike.

The officious have no devotion to office as such: they are generally indifferent to or set against the institution of which they are part. There is a trans-institutional culture of officiousness, which traverses institutions as different as schools, councils, hospitals and art galleries. Very different sectional interests produce day-glo busybodies, indistinguishable except by close examination of their badge: they could be from private companies, councils or the police. These officials talk the same language and can move easily between jobs in different sectors. They often believe that their institution is beset with a host of problems, whether that is racism, sexism, environmentally unfriendly or 'unsafe' habits, and the institution is equally the target for their interventions as is the general public.

At base, these officials' only positive allegiance is to the mechanisms of officialdom; their only belief is in the inherent virtues of regulation. The objects of their faith are the database, the form, the code; these forms of bureaucratic procedure are attributed with a fetishistic power. They demand that every organisation has 'policies in place', which is seen as a guarantee of safety and right conduct, regardless of what the policy actually says....