Occasional Scribbles

I heard a saying a while back which said, you know you are getting old when you find the Antiques roadshow interesting!! I must be getting a bit old as I find it mildly entertaining! I know i’m not THAT old as I have a child of school age but in other ways I feel old. I find the news distressing and I actually care about what’s going on, especially in this country. Of course there is plenty of change in this country at the moment – and not for the better.

The smoking ban in public places has not only annoyed me but has genuinely affected the pub trade, especially pubs in rural places who can’t easily manage a drop in numbers or the expense of putting up an outside structure for smoking. This pub, like many in the country is in the middle of nowhere. It makes no sense or difference whatsoever, if people carry on smoking as they always have. It affects absolutely no one.

This govenment has been all too quick to implement bans on anything it wants when that is not the correct way to deal with things. These issues should be properly debated and due process should be observed. Democracy? Rarely does this government behave in a proper way and it is clear they have utter contempt for the people of this country.

I feel like a stranger in my own country. I find myself having to warn my 13 year old son to mind what he says and sometimes he asks me if he is allowed to say something. How did we get to this point? Slowly is the answer, it has crept up on us. We are now a nation who is spied upon more than any other. And this government wants to electronically tag us all via bio metric passports and identity cards. Despite a recent evaluation carried out to assess whether ID cards would make us safer from terrorism and finding that they would not, the government still want to force them onto us all. They are suggesting that the cards could be introduced gradually starting with with people who work in ‘sensitive’ areas such as airport and border staff but clearly this is just a way to get us to accept them. They will then make it impossible to obtain ordinary things such as bank accounts, getting driving licences etc until we all have to have them. How long will it be before we are tattooed with a number? These are frightening times. Peter Hitchens, writer and columnist for the Mail on Sunday has had an ongoing campaign urging people to renew their passports now in the hope that long before they expire, this governement will have been booted out and the next will scrap this vile scheme.

It seems to me that apart from the fact that this government cannot be trusted with personal data as it keeps allowing it to be lost and stolen; there is also the fact that no data can truly be protected from hackers and criminals or terrorists and therefore until it can be proved to be safe we should not be asked for it whether by means of bio passports, ID cards or anything else. And that is just the safety aspect. The moral rights and wrongs are another matter. Whether a government should interfere to such an extent in peoples lives is a question to consider. People in this country are used to thinking that the state is a benign affair and mostly it has been. However, we cannot depend on it being so in the future.

George Orwells 1984 is upon us now in some ways. Traditionally the labour party has always tried to nanny the people while the Conservatives tend to leave people to get on with their lives without interference. We have had a Labour government now for such a long time and we have been ‘nannied’ by it for too long. Everywhere you look, especially on TV they are telling us what we should be doing in every aspect of our lives. We are bombarded by state advertising telling us not to smoke, what to eat, how much exercise we should take, how to raise our children and worse, the state now feels that we are incapable of raising our children. They interfere now more than ever and have a band of teachers, social workers and police ready to report us if they disagree with our ways of child rearing. I would be really worried if I was having a baby now. Thankfully my children are nearly grown up, the youngest has only a few years left at school.

You might feel you can shut yourelf away in your own home and bury your head but under this government your home is no longer sacrosanct. The Englishman’s home is not his castle anymore. Other people can now enter it should they wish. The tax office is now able to come in without invitation and put bugs in your home and spy on you. If you wish to sell your home, you are now subjected to a nasty little inspector who will come and see if your windows and doors fit properly and your roof is insulated. This is ostensibly for the benefit of the purchaser but is really another way to collect data on us all and see if we are doing our duty by the ‘Green brigade’. Are we allowing our precious heat to escape our of creaky old houses and therefore burning more fuel than we should. Clearly this scheme is designed to punish us at some point along the line once the data is in, much the same as the monitoring of our rubbish tells how much we recycle and how much we can be fined, our houses will be a source of similar revenue. And how long before we have inspectors for our cars when we wish to sell them. What business is it of the government what shape our houses are in when we wish to sell them. By introducing this scheme the government is saying that we are not capable of deciding whether we wish to buy a house warts and all and are not able to negotiate the purchase without their help. They must tell us if the house is in good order for we cannot be trusted to find out for ourselves or prevent us from being ripped off by the vendors. Of course this is patent nonsense and it is not about protecting our buyers rights but about protecting the prospect of a ‘green’ tax on properties not kept up to the satisfaction of this ever demanding government. And so the last bastion of the Englishman, his castle, is no more. Depressing isn’t it. The times they are a-changing.