Being offensive should not be a cause for complaint to the police - or we risk becoming a police state, argues Theodore Dalrymple

Newspaper comment - however offensive we might find it - should never be a matter for the police, argues Theodore Dalrymple.

A piece in the Daily Mail by the columnist Jan Moir about the death of the pop singer, Stephen Gately, has occasioned (so far) 22,000 complaints to the Press Complaints Commission. This is more, apparently, than it has ever received about any other single article. While I accept that complainers are not necessarily representative of the population as a whole, this outpouring of outrage is, perhaps, an indication of what the British public is interested in, and what it thinks important in this time of crisis.

Gately, aged 33, was found dead in his pyjamas on a couch. His lover was off elsewhere. The offending article about his death said, inter alia (including an encomium to the deceased's charm), that

Under the carapace of glittering, hedonistic celebrity, the ooze of a very different and more dangerous lifestyle has seeped out for all to see.

This was because, in the opinion of the columnist, young men of Gately's age do not die suddenly and unexpectedly of natural causes. They die, presumably, of wickedness or depravity, at least of the inevitable consequences of wickedness or depravity.

As it happens, this is not always true. Young men of Gately's age do sometimes die unexpectedly of natural causes, and apparently he was one of them. The article was factually wrong, therefore; and one of the lessons of the episode, at least for journalists, is that one should not opine on the causes of an unexpected death in advance of the post mortem results.

The tone of the article was very far from nihil nisi bonum, and no doubt was ungenerous in spirit. I myself know nothing, neither good nor ill, of the deceased, though I must confess that his profession does not predispose me much in his favour. However, in the absence of knowledge of definite evil on the part of a recently dead person, it seems to me that the conventional piety of saying nothing ill of him is a decent one.

One important question that the case provoked in my mind was: do really bad men wear pyjamas? I know of no research on this important question.

The most alarming aspect of the story, however, is that the police received complaints about the article.

Presumably this was because Gately was homosexual and those who complained felt that the article was derogatory - by implication, nothing was said directly - of homosexuals. In fact, had Gately not been homosexual, and had it been his wife who was not present at his death, the columnist for the Daily Mail might have written precisely the same words; but let that pass. By no stretch of the imagination could it be said that the article was an incitement to an illegal act, at least in the traditional sense.

It seems that the police are now to be resorted to, at least by some of us, when we have our feelings offended. In the conception of the complainers, presumably, the article was an expression of contempt and therefore of incitement to contempt. And since we all have an inalienable right to the equal regard of everyone, the article was, or should have been, against the law.

I have no idea how seriously the police took the complaints. Alas, I have no confidence that they dismissed them out of hand. The capacity of British public servants, in the atmosphere of political correctness in which they now have to work, to get everything exactly the wrong way round, doing what they ought not to do, and not doing what the ought, is very great. Chief constables are now less policemen than managers of public opinion whose job is the placation of vocal pressure groups. Let mayhem reign, so long as pressure groups are satisfied.

But even if the police took no notice of the complaints, it is not necessarily true that the complaints will have had no effect. The fact that they were made at all, that everyone now knows that they were made, and that we cannot rely on the police to dismiss them out of hand as neurotic if not actually psychotic, is sufficient to induce people, who want no trouble with the police, to start watching their ps and qs. Freedom of expression is thus nibbled away, not by censorship, but by self-censorship. We begin to live in an atmosphere of fear, in which walls have ears.

This atmosphere is already very strong in much of the public service. No one wants to be caught saying anything that might offend anyone, and that might lead to a formal complaint. After all, the definition of offences such as bullying are often so broad and loosely defined that, once the charge is brought, it is nearly impossible to defend yourself against it. You enter a Kafka-esque world in which refutation is impossible. It is best, therefore, to be utterly bland and never speak your mind.

Exquisite sensitivity is, of course, very useful to managers, who exert their power by exhaustive and exhausting investigation of the ill-defined and undisprovable. Immense labour goes into the attempted capture of clouds; and once someone has experienced an investigation into such a complaint against him, lasting weeks or months, he is changed for life.

To go running off to teacher if our feelings are offended, even if the person who offended them is indeed offensive and fully intended to be offensive, is to increase the power of teacher over us. It is to demand that teacher regulate our speech in minute particulars; and once the grosser violations of our feelings are suppressed, we will become yet more sensitive, so that what were once minor violations of our feelings become gross in our own estimate, until we extinguish our own altogether.

The more benefits the authorities claim to confer upon us, the greater the scope for informing. Recently in my local council offices I saw a poster asking the public to inform upon those who were cheating on Social Security (the picture of such a cheat was of an obese young woman, junk food made flesh). When I told the staff that I found the poster creepy, they were surprised and did not know what I meant. Was I in favour of benefit fraud? Of course not, I said; but even less was I in favour of a population of informers. And that is precisely what a benevolently overweening state will produce.

Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and worked for many years as an inner city and prison doctor. He is the author of the author of Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy and In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas.