If I had Trevor Phillips’s job, I’d already have signed up for Dignitas

Not so long ago, the National Consumer Council decided that some shops on railway stations were selling chocolate bars too cheaply and that the public should, for its own protection, pay more for them. This occurred at about the same time as the RSPB mulled over the possibility that it might start shooting or gassing or strangling parakeets (it has since denied it ever intended such a thing). All we needed was a short statement from the NSPCC to the effect that it was entirely in favour of the occasional child sacrifice from time to time and we would have been in an almost perfect upside-down world. But instead the NSPCC insisted that one in five children suffered from abuse, while one of the main disability lobby groups argued that one in three British people was disabled.

In a way, all of these organisations — the ones now campaigning for the very opposite of what they were set up to campaign for and the ones issuing ever more bizarre, grandstanding claims — are reacting to the same problem, one which afflicts all organisations that were set up to fight for the rights of one or another minority group and have now more or less achieved their goals (and we’ll exclude the RSPB from that).