Immeasurable happiness

Thursday September 1, 2011

Happiness cannot be defined or captured by diktat. The government’s ‘Wellbeing Index’ is a deplorable intervention which is doomed to fail and should be scrapped, says Simon Hills

One of my most favoured possessions is a photo book curated by John Tennant called Football: The Golden Age. Along with Cricket: The Golden Age and Motor Racing: The Golden Age, the book is alive with cameos from sportsmen and spectators on and off the pitch and track.

Tennant’s only real consideration was that the images largely predated colour photography in news reporting, and more importantly the camera motor-drive. Instead of reeling off a quick couple of hundred frames, the photographers really had to think about the atmosphere and the resonance of the shot with each precious click of the shutter.

Despite the sheer aesthetic brilliance of their execution and selection, these magnificent books reveal two things. The first is a dignity that we probably lost when George Best was found in a hotel room with Miss Universe, (‘Where did it all go wrong, Mr Best,’ as the room service waiter was reported to have exclaimed); there are no caps here emblazoned with sponsors’ logos, no flashing of tattoos, no walking onto the pitch and parading a baybee. The other is a simple happiness that radiates from its black and white pages.

It is fashionable to talk of the greyness of 20th Century Britain. But here, beneath leaden skies, gargantuan gasworks and chimneys belching smoke into the air, are images of an unflinching joie de vivre. From the women of Maldon Ladies Football Club circa 1953 trotting out for a match, to the packed crowd at Upton Park passing a schoolboy over their shoulders in 1930, to the WAGS of the Liverpool squad in London posing at the FA cup final in 1971, to the boys having a kickabout in Salford in May 1955, everyone is SMILING.

Compare and contrast to the lumpen, spoilt visages of 21st century sportsmen and their acolytes that inhabit today’s newspapers and magazines.

I should, then, be delighted that David Cameron should persist in his search for a happiness index. It was announced last month (at the start of the silly season before we were diverted by a bit of light rioting) that statisticians will unveil Britain’s first Wellbeing Index indicators this autumn, followed by annual life satisfaction ratings in July 2012. 200,000 people will be asked to rate, on a scale of zero to ten, their satisfaction, happiness, anxiety and belief that what they do in life is worthwhile.

I should be delighted, but instead I despair. The sheer fatuousness of this proposal, even by our prime minister’s standards, beggars belief. It encompasses everything that is dispiriting about our happy-clappy, politically correct age: the idea that happiness can somehow be measured and then presumably added to by the state; the employment of so many teams of researchers engaged in futile, but well remunerated tasks on our money; the idea that happiness in any case can be defined.

The notion that our superannuated politicians with an Uncle Joe Stalin paternalism can add to our enjoyment as life is as realistic as giving everyone a Tardis. Boris Johnson’s closing down half of central London for the ridiculous cycling event Skyride is emblematic of this nonsense. Freedom is phoning round a couple of mates, making up some sandwiches, setting off at seven in the morning and making for the North Downs. It not closing down the main arteries of central London for an orgy of enforced fun.

Eleanor Roosevelt declared that ‘Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product,’ and you only have to look through the pages of John Tennant’s books to see it in evidence. Happiness has, in other words, as much to do with the state as Cheryl Cole has to do with quantum physics.

What the state might care to do, however, is get off our backs. I personally would be much happier if politicians immediately:

1. Let me smoke with my friends in a pub.
2. Remove every speedbump in the land…
3. … and every speed camera.
4. Put people who do bad things in prison. And if there isn’t enough room for them, build some more prisons.
5. Desist from sticking nannying signs across the country, particularly those on the motorways that flash up things such as the illiterate ‘Think. Don’t Drive Tired’. (Tired WHAT exactly?)
6. Wasting my money on £37bn vanity projects like the High Speed Rail Link and make the trains we do have run properly.
7. Protect our borders.
8. Stop closing down London’s streets for their own self-aggrandisement.

That should do it for starters. In fact, what they would be doing is returning the country to how it was for much of the 20th century. Not the wars and the poverty, obviously, but an understanding that whatever else befell us, we were free. The Second World War was all about fighting for a society where we weren’t expect to genuflect in front of a Hitler in mass rallies or send our children to state-approved summer camps.

Mr Cameron should cancel this ridiculous Wellbeing Index project right now, and recognise that a only a free society can be a happy one. As that enviable sage, Benjamin Franklin was reported to have said: ‘The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.’

Simon Hills is associate editor of The Times Magazine and author of Strictly No! How We’re Being Overrun by the Nanny State