A surge of ebullience and pep last night as I noted that in the supermarket you can now buy 12 loratadine tablets for less than 90p. When Clarityn had a monopoly on this marvellous antihistamine drug a few years ago it was 6 tablets for a fiver. Loratadine, along with a liquid called fluctisone-summat wot I squirts up me snoz, has utterly transformed my quality of life in spring and summer (or Tally and Spate), seasons that used to be crippled by wretched blasted rotten hayfever.
Thus our lives have sneakily improved in so many areas over the last decade, even as New Labour tried to spoil them with endless legislative micromanagement. I have been attracted to the notion of a fallow year of Government, where no new laws are passed for 12 months; let the land recover, like Glastonbury.
But now I find that our boys CamClegg are going to go much further than that, and will have a burst of glorious unlawmaking.
According to the BBC, Clegg will today make a speech about how the Coalition aims to…
"transform our politics so the state has far less control over you, and you have far more control over the state".
This would include scrapping the ID card scheme and accompanying National Identity Register, all future biometric passports and the children's Contact Point Database and ensuring CCTV was "properly regulated" and restricting the storage of innocent people's DNA.
He will also accuse the previous government of "obsessive lawmaking" and pledge to "get rid of the unnecessary laws" and "introduce a mechanism to block pointless new criminal offences".
He will also pledge to ask the public "which laws you think should go" as they "tear through the statute book".
I agree with Nick.
I thought you liked cctv? ;p
ReplyDeleteI was going to post about this too, but you've done it x100 better than I ever could, so I won't!
suffice to say that I too was immensely cheered by this wonderful news flowering from my radio as I drove to work this morning
But surely without a fine cage of laws to confine us we will return to a Hobbesian state and rip each other to shreds?
ReplyDeleteIsn't it remarkable how a purportedly leftish government - the left being the ones who are supposed to be optimistic about human nature - has shown itself to be so distrustful of people? Or should this hypocrisy be entirely predictable after the century we've just had?
The problem is semantic, in that we've come to conflate 'left' and 'liberal', when they are often opposed.
ReplyDeleteMy cup runneth over, Davick are offering ..to turn the Gatso's into Belisha beacons, force plod to bang up the villains, not people who take the widdle out of one legged black lesbian single mothers and, and, most importantly, tear up the doctors contract and tell them to get back to work, or else (I had a conversation recently with a retired 'highly respected' surgeon, he is receiving letters from his old employers asking if he would consider returning for short periods, at £5000 per day
ReplyDeleteThere are more CCTV cameras in the Shetland islands than in San Francisco.