HAVE YOU HAD YOUR MENTAL HEALTH CHECK-UP?

It says you've been on Twitter again, you naughty girl

The scene is a busy A&E department. A motorcyclist is brought in on a stretcher. He is conscious but clearly in some pain. He is lifted onto a bed in a cubicle, and a triage nurse talks to him in a kind voice.

‘Hello sir. Ooh, you’ve had a bit of a bump. It looks like you’ve dislocated that shoulder, but nothing’s broken and you’ll be right as rain in no time!’

‘Thank you, nurse’.

‘Now. Can I just see your updated all-clear card?’

‘My what?’

‘Your all-clear card. It’s to make sure your social media comments are all PC-compliant’.

‘I don’t think I – ‘

‘Don’t worry. When the paramedic took your details in the ambulance, we ran you through the system. How’s that shoulder?’

‘Very, very painful. Could I have something for the pain please?’

‘Well, let’s have a little chat about Facebook first’.

‘What?’

‘On December 14th last year, you did write that there were “only two genders”, didn’t you Mr… Foulds?’

‘What?’

‘And in… January you re-Tweeted some statistics about so-called grooming gangs’.

‘Please. I’m in a very great deal of pain’.

‘Yes, we’ll get to that. Now, the following week…’

Britain’s NHS, an over-managed, bureaucratically bloated, waste-heavy, inefficient national institution, has not suggested going as far as checking your thought, but it has made a start by suggesting that racist, homophobic (continue list until the cows actually do come home) comments to staff may result in a withdrawal of treatment rights for patients. This may be the precursor to the full mental cavity search.

Now, if someone yells at a nurse, say, ‘I want a fackin’ pain-killer and I don’t want it brought by no Paki neiver’, we concur that a level of action is warranted. But when a woman requests a female nurse for a vaginal swab and is sent a bearded transsexual man, and then complains (this actually happened) before being reprimanded, then slopes begin to become slippery. The Chinese have already started openly punishing ‘social misdemeanours’ by the cessation of certain fundamental consumer rights, the ‘statutory rights’ you can read about on your Mars bar or packet of bog-roll if the afternoon is inclement. Is Britain next?

The Chinese, of course, call their social credit system a Social Credit System, and it means you can’t get a railway ticket if you once called Andy Warhol’s silk-screen of Mao Xidong ‘a bit crap, to be honest’ (老實說有點廢話) The British, not wanting to sound so officious and bureaucratic and, well, like Communists, will want something a bit warmer and friendlier like, ooh, I don’t know, Good Boy Choccy Drops. Like the ones you give your terrier when it hasn’t shat all over the carpet while you were out at the Benefits Office. Sounds like you’re getting something rather than having something taken away.

Seriously, how long before a full social media check decides whether you receive healthcare, benefit, pension advice or the ability to take a train to Solihull? Conservative views openly expressed on social media will already count you out of employment in the public sector, why not go the full nine yards and say that because you wrote on Instagram that you always knew Philip Schofield was a rear admiral, no tickets for Les Misérables for you or your family, my old China?

The elites loved social media at first because it allowed them to be down with the kids by using it. Then they hated it because adults started using it to disseminate information the MSM are paid to hush up. Now they love it again because it’s a panopticon so big it would have given Jeremy Bentham a hard-on.

Great Britain is rapidly becoming the Soviet Union with marginally better dental care and Harrod’s, and it is a racing certainty that what starts life looking like a genuine attempt to curtail real racism – which certainly exists on the battlefield of the modern hospital – will soon be extended to curtail ideological naughtiness. Thus, if you believe that when it comes to post-divorce custody of children, the legal system is heavily skewed in favour of women, and you wish to note this opinion on social media, be our guest. Just be extra careful when it’s icy. You wouldn’t want to take a fall and end up in the hospital.

Photo credit - Ministry of Information, Photo Division