The excuse was wildfires. There are wildfires in Britain every year and no one ever dies from them, but Andy Burnham was in Stourbridge on Friday inspecting burnt-out buildings and so disposable barbecues were promptly banned and 87million phones jumped to attention to tell the entire population to not light a fire.

Did the nation’s teenage arsonists take heed of this warning? We may never know. The national alert may even have given some mischievous scamps an idea. The man who was arrested the following morning for lighting 10 fires in a London park apparently did not get the memo.

The unintended consequences of texting everyone in the country with a loud beep that sounds even if your phone is muted were widely discussed when the test alert was sent last September. There are particular concerns about domestic abuse victims who carry secret phones. Shift workers trying to get some sleep don’t appreciate being woken up. There is the aforementioned danger of people pranging their cars. And if the system is overused, there is a good chance that people will simply turn off the notifications (settings > notifications > scroll to the bottom). I have now done so and I suspect several million others have, too.

I suppose this means that if aliens land, I could be the last to know, but I can live with that. An Englishman’s phone is his castle and I do not want the government near it. Wildfires in summer are neither an extreme nor imminent threat to me or most other people. They are not a national emergency and they do not justify a national alert. If the state thinks it is appropriate to use its new toy to tell us not to ‘undertake any activity that could start a fire’, it will not be long before it uses it to tell us to eat our greens and turn the heating on in winter. Everything from climate change to the cost of living is a ‘crisis’ to the political class, and everything from obesity to loneliness is an ‘epidemic’. I do not trust these people to use their power responsibly. They did not do so during the pandemic and British politics has been one big slippery slope for as long as I can remember.

The nauseating thing about the national alert was how many bootlicking gimps came out in support of it. It’s just another text message, they said. You probably get notifications all the time, they said. True, but they are notifications from people I want to hear from and they don’t have the audacity to override the mute button. I don’t want to hear from the government on a sunny Friday evening. I don’t even want to be reminded of its existence. In the immortal words of Javier Milei, my contempt for the state is infinite. National alerts are another encroachment into our lives from a state that has already encroached too much.

What would be an appropriate use for a national alert system? An asteroid hurtling towards Britain or Vladimir Putin dropping the big one would be suitably ‘severe’, but perhaps we would be better off spending our final minutes in blissful ignorance. For everything else, people can get their notifications from the BBC or Sky if they want to keep abreast of the news.

To justify its existence, the national alerts would have to be aimed at people who never watch the news, never read the newspapers and never speak to other people about current affairs. So perhaps we should confine them to telling certain women that their pension age will be rising in a few decades time?

Christopher Snowdon is director of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs and the co-host of Last Orders, spiked’s nanny-state podcast.

You’ve hit your monthly free article limit.

Support spiked and get unlimited access.

spiked is funded by readers like you. Only 0.1% of regular readers currently support us. If just 1% did, we could grow our team and step up the fight for free speech and democracy.

Become a spiked supporter and enjoy unlimited, ad-free access, bonus content and exclusive events – while helping to keep independent journalism alive.