'where you ... draw the line between personal freedom and the state's responsibility towards protecting people from themselves'
It is essentially about the level of risk and harm and whether that harm harms wider society or not and to what extent. It is similar to the free speech argument. You have to balance the good of free speech with the harm. Authoritarian states, Stasi, Big Brother and nanny states often restrict liberties under the pretext of doing it for the citizens' own good. New Labour wanted to introduce DNA databases and biometric ID cards for our own good.
The positives of seat belts outweigh the negatives (although some campaigners campaign against the mandatory wearing of seatbelts because they feel differently, but if a campaign is not backed and funded and does not have press coverage then it generally loses).
The nanny state (which is mainly progressive) tends to extend its reach little by little. There was a time when Conservatives were against the nanny state, but we have a different type of Conservative now - Cameron and the modernisers who are Conservative in name only. Cameron wanted minimum alcohol pricing and plain paper cigarette packaging. But the People's Army opposes Cameron and says no
"– UKIP opposes ‘plain paper packaging’ for tobacco products and minimum pricing of alcohol."
The People's Army is the home of the anti-nanny state defenders of liberties, it opposes the modernisers and the progressive encroachment on liberties (apart from the new Establishment type politically correct factions of UKIP) where the progressive state seeks to disproportionately limit freedoms.
The progressives usually seek to restrict the liberties of working people to smoke and drink (based on arguments of harm), but paradoxically they seek to liberalise drugs. The traditional conservatives and the People's Army take the opposite view. They see the harm of drugs to society as a whole as an immense danger and think that the harm ruins thousands of lives and they want to limit the supply of drugs and punish dealers with harsh punishments etc in order to stop the supply.
Farage usually has his finger on the pulse of public opinion, he has a natural gift to understand the public mood, he is in touch with the majority, but on this issue of drug liberalisation he is out of touch with the majority and out of touch with the People's Army. I think it is because Farage operates on gut feel and on this one he has not got the feel, not got the touch.
On drug liberalisation you have the progressives for it - the Establishment, Branson, Russell Brand, Nick Clegg etc. and the non-progressive Farage. Against it you have the People's Army, the Daily Mail, traditional conservatives and Old Labour working class.
On this issue the People's Army says that society is more important than the individual since the harm is so great, whereas usually the People's Army is for the individual over the state.
What is so fascinating about the UKIP phenomenon is that it represents the silent majority, the "common sense" majority who are voiceless and powerless against the much more powerful Establishment, liberal progressive metropolitan elite and the Tory modernisers. For once there is a party that represents this huge silent majority and these people now have a party that represents their values. As Farage said
"But if you really have had enough of the political elite. If you really have had enough of poor policy making, unchecked migration, unavailable school places, immense strain on the national services, our EU membership, our extraordinarily large foreign aid budget and more… then you don’t have to vote that way anymore."
The BBC's excellent John Humphrys says it today in the Mail on Sunday
"And he said BBC employees are unable to understand the concerns of ordinary people because they typically have ‘sheltered’ middle-class lives and are overwhelmingly ‘liberal Oxbridge males’.
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2873484/Radio-4-s-John-Humphrys-admits-BBC-ignored-mass-immigration-fearing-branded-racist-critics.html
UKIP represents the values of millions of people who for years were denied a voice by the liberal elite. The liberal elite imposed nanny state policies and could laugh at the public because the public had no champion, but everything has changed, now they have Farage.
"This is perhaps Nigel Farage’s most potent line of attack: that the liberal, metropolitan elites who hate ordinary Brits and employ foreign nannies have stitched up the political system, rigged the economy in their favour, ripped off their parliamentary expenses and are laughing at us all behind our backs."
The metropolitan elite never saw it coming, they never thought the people would have a champion, they always mocked the Daily Mail. But now they are stunned by UKIP
"So this is now the scenario; if Labour does not organise to tackle the UKIP threat, convince voters that we are the right choice in a General Election and expose the horror of five more years of Cameron and Clegg, then in 344 days time, the Labour Party in Essex will be on the brink of electoral extinction."
labourlist.org/2014/05/ukips-success-in-essex-shows-the-scale-of-our-challenge/
We're tearing up their lawns and they don't know what to do.
"Their tanks are digging up my lawn," Sarah Champion, Labour's MP for Rotherham, told the Today programme this morning. Ukip are in Doncaster today for their annual conference, with Labour firmly in their sights, and that party is beginning to worry."