“This is how you crush a society”

de Tocqueville had this figured out 180 years ago: pic.twitter.com/uAlXJJ4FxE

— TurnedFourthing (@turnedfourthing) May 2, 2026

I thought that this apparently minor news story from the Telegraph, the comment made by someone called Bernie@Artemisfornow while linking to the story on Twitter, and the reply to that comment with an apt quote by Alexis de Tocqueville were all worth highlighting.

In case the screenshot goes away, the Telegraph story has the headline “Volunteer banned from cleaning graves over ‘health and safety’ fears” and the standfirst “Ben McGregor says South Tyneside authority has threatened him with legal action, despite praise from families“. It continues,

A volunteer has been banned from cleaning graves because the council says it is not safe.

Ben McGregor, 25, washes the headstones at Hebburn Cemetery, South Tyneside, with only soap, water and a bristle brush.

He lost both his father and his best friend to suicide and, after struggling with his own mental health, said that “if I am helping others, it helps me”.

However, the Labour-led council claims it would be “inappropriate” for Mr McGregor to continue his work because “safety checks have not taken place”.

He has been praised by families for his transformations of the headstones, but said the council had threatened him with legal action if he did not stop.

Mr McGregor said: “The one that stands out to me is a woman who was suffering from cancer. She was crying on the phone, saying that’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me. The council’s response has blown my mind. It’s doing my head in”.

To which Bernie@Artemisfornow replied,

This is England, where even the kindest, most human acts are subject to control by authoritarian pen pushers.

Using “health and safety” to stop a young 25 year old man from cleaning gravestones with soap and water.

This is how you crush a society. You do it by smothering small acts of decency, like driving people home from the pub and cleaning gravestones. You do it by putting rules in the way of people pulling together, until eventually they just stop trying.

and TurnedFourthing @turnedfourthing in turn replied,

de Tocqueville had this figured out 180 years ago:

After having thus taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded him as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupifies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I have always believed that this sort of servitude, regulated, mild and peaceful, of which I have just done the portrait, could be combined better than we imagine with some of the external forms of liberty, and that it would not be impossible for it to be established in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.

– Alexis de Tocqueville