Remember, remember what actually happened

The demand that x, y or z "should be banned" is regularly heard these days – generally directed at things or ways of behaving that the demander personally doesn't like.

No matter how liberal, libertarian or laissez-faire an individual is most of the time, pick on something they subjectively object to and you can generally rely on the fascist within to surface and call for the coercive power of the state to be thrown behind the removal of other people's freedoms to do, be or have something they disapprove of.

So it is not without some trepidation and discomfort that I ask "why in god's name doesn't the government ban the public sale of fireworks?"

From now until around early December, every night is Bonfire Night for someone. As soon as it gets dark until around 11pm, someone somewhere within earshot of your house is going to be setting off small incendiary bombs for their own amusement without regard to the welfare of you, your kids, your pets, farm animals etc etc.

No doubt some of them will be maimed or killed – as they are every year – and a load of buildings will be burned down, either by stupidity or intentional malice or the combination of both that appears to be the hallmark of 21st century Britain.

It seems crazy to me that, when pretty much every other way of behaving anti-socially or self-destructively is on the Nanny State's agenda for eradication, the selling of explosives to children and drunks for use in their own homes is not higher up the list.

At the moment though, it's not just fireworks that are dragging out the whole Bonfire Night misery over an ever-growing stretch of the year. Disaffected middle class people the world over seem to have adopted the image of Guy Fawkes from the film V for Vendetta as in some way symbolic of their tiresome festival/holiday/protests against capitalism.

Never mind that every V mask purchased profits Time Warner (Dow Jones – TWX; current market capitalisation - around $35 billion; preferred economic system – capitalism). Guy Fawkes is a pretty crap symbol of anti-authoritarianism.

When he tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament and King James I in 1605, Fawkes and his pals were emphatically NOT doing it in the name of democracy, freedom, socialism, organic wind farms or anything else that our protesting friends would believe in.

He was, in fact, trying to kill a Protestant king in order to put a Catholic monarch on the throne. I've got nothing against Catholics TODAY, but the experience of sectarian strife under the last two explicitly Catholic British monarchs – Mary and James II – suggests this would have led to the destruction of any nascent democratic stirrings in a torrent of blood and burning heretics.

That's not to say, of course, that the Protestant royals of the time were any less inclined towards violent repression on religious grounds. The main problem, I reckon, was perhaps more that back then rulers felt that political power implied a right to slaughter not only anyone who didn't DO what they wanted them to do, but also didn't THINK what they wanted them to think.

Nevertheless, I think if you look at the history of Protestant countries and Catholic countries in Europe from the 1600s onwards, it seems reasonable to conclude that the former ended up rather more liberal and democratic a lot more quickly than the latter. That's just what happened in history, innit?

Anyway - in the same way that pseudo radicals are content to forget that dear old Che Guevara ordered the execution of civilians because he looks good on a T shirt, only someone who didn't really have a clue what Guy Fawkes was trying to achieve would adopt him as a democratic icon.