‘Ne bousculez personne que vous ne connaissez pas.’ Or, en anglais, ‘don’t push anyone you don’t know’.

This commonsense instruction is what passes for health and safety advice at the world’s largest inflatable aquapark on Lake Biscarrosse in south-west France, a highlight of our family holiday earlier this month. For the uninitiated, an aquapark is a giant inflatable floating obstacle course where participants attempt to climb, jump, balance and swim their way around a series of slides, jumps and ramps, while falling (or being pushed) frequently into the lake. Aquaparks do exist in the UK, but they offer a far less enjoyable experience, partly due to our generally unfavourable water temperatures, but mostly because of the sheer number of things you are not allowed to do. No running, no jumping, no diving, no flipping, no pushing – even of your own friends and family. In short, no fun.

In France, citizens are generally expected to take responsibility for their own personal safety. I have been fortunate to enjoy regular French holidays since I was a child, and in recent years I have been increasingly struck by the growing contrast between Gallic liberté and Britain’s oppressive nanny state.

Over the course of our two-week holiday this year, we visited dozens of cafés, restaurants and boulangeries. Not once were any of us asked if we had any food allergies or intolerances. On the train, no one reminded us to carry water in hot weather or to take our possessions with us at the end of the journey. Crossing an estuary on a small foot ferry, we hung over the side of the boat and no one told us off.

On the motorways, instead of endless gantry messages telling us that ‘tiredness can kill’, signs instead point to the next service area, where one can expect clean toilets and a freshly made croque monsieur.

In the Vendée region, tourists can climb up Le Pey de la Blet, a wooden platform over 100 feet in the air, to experience a magnificent view over the Atlantic coast. Apart from a waist-height wooden handrail, there is nothing to stop you from falling to your death in the forest below. Yet the ‘staircase in the sky’ is not manned or managed in any way; just park nearby and climb on up. It is impossible to imagine such an attraction here in Britain.

These may seem like small differences between our sister countries but the cumulative effect is significant. In a physical sense, France still feels free, whereas the UK is increasingly becoming a nation of people worn down by constant reminders of everyday hazards and discouraged from taking any risks at all.

It’s a far cry from the bold and courageous Britain of Drake, Nelson and Churchill. Perhaps our modern descent into nanny-state timidity has in part been caused by our absurdly expansive liability laws, discussed by Henry Hill here. Yet the popularity of Covid lockdowns revealed just how deep the desire is within the British psyche for authorities to prevent all harm. Other countries also had lockdowns of course, but none seemed quite so eager to delegate all personal responsibility to the state.

For many of us, being mollycoddled is intensely annoying, denying us agency, independence and decision-making powers. It is infantilising to be told that a steaming cup of fresh coffee might be hot or that the railway platform could be slippery when wet. But even those who welcome this level of safetyism need to recognise that, on a societal level, nanny statism is de-skilling us, eroding the competence of individuals in taking responsibility for their own safety. The expectation that our physical environment is always being managed by those in authority creates a ‘bystander effect’, whereby people gradually surrender their own agency and lose the ability to manage risk themselves.

When it comes to basic physical skills – like climbing and jumping – British children are significantly less able than a generation ago and declining at a far greater rate than almost all their international peers. This is hardly surprising when a detailed risk assessment is required even for a school visit to the local park, where the roundabout will have been removed, the slide lowered, and the swings restricted, just in case the children might want to have fun.

Health and safety is not a zero-sum game. Of course we should have laws and regulations that reduce serious and widespread dangers. When transformative new products emerge – such as the motor car, or pharmaceuticals or the internet – legislators have to find a balance between safety and freedom. But if an ordinary adult can navigate a particular hazard by exercising moderate care and attention, then laws, regulations and nagging are not required.

There is much current concern about the state of freedom in Britain. Public debates have mostly focussed on the very real threats to our metaphysical freedoms, such as the freedoms of speech, expression and belief. Yet we must also pay urgent attention to our shrinking physical freedoms, and challenge the drive to eliminate all risk.

France has many, many problems of its own. But last week, as I watched my teenagers dive, backflip and push each other off waterslides without any interference, I couldn’t help but grieve the freedoms we have lost here in Britain. Perhaps it’s time to defund the fun police.

Miriam Cates is a GB News presenter, senior fellow at the Centre for Social Justice and a former Conservative MP.

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