didn't take long for users to spot the painful irony of their official avatar, which simply says Kent police 101. The number is taken from the non-essential police phone number, but as we all know, Room 101 was where Winston Smith was taken in George Orwell's 1984 to be tortured and eventually persuaded to recant his individual beliefs and fall into line with officially sanctioned viewpoints. The Orwellian allusion inevitably fed countless suggestions that we are, or are becoming, a police state, a dictatorship, even a fascist society. Such allegations miss the point: they use a 20th century microscope to analyse a 21st century problem. The Orwellian model of tyranny was invariably nailed to political propaganda, and the policing of thought-crime served only to protect and preserve a political elite or ideology. This is not what is happening in modern Britain. The new tyrant is not an oligarch or a chief of secret police, but an amorphous, self-righteous tide of populist opinion that demands conformity to a strict set of moral values. What we are seeing has less to do with the iron heel than with the pitchfork. Last month in Lancashire, 20-year-old Matthew Woods posted some sick jokes about missing child April Jones. Almost instantly, his name and photo were being circulated with messages asking "who is this sick bastard?" Within hours, dozens of angry people had gathered outside a house that had (wrongly) been identified as his home. He was arrested elsewhere, and two days later imprisoned for