WHAT a sad little world of petty prohibition and small ambition is government at both national and local levels.
After the vindictive ban on smoking in bars, restaurants and all workplaces, along comes the next target – the handy plastic bags given away by supermarkets.
Warren Bradley, leader of the phenomenally under-achieving Liverpool City Council, is the latest tin-pot politician to call on retailers to start charging for placcy bags.
Currently under investigation by the Standards Board into alleged bullying of Liverpool’s former Culture Company chief executive Jason Harborow, Cllr Bradley ought to have more important things to worry about.
Instead he prefers to squawk gesture politics rubbish about plastic bags, landfill sites and saving the planet – plucked from the nearest passing populist breeze. How typical of a Liberal Democrat.
I’m heartily sick of hearing people banging on about the environment.
I neither trust nor believe the outpouring of data about global warming pumped out by scientists in the pay of militantly green non-governmental organisations and the useless United Nations.
Fact. The Earth heats up then cools down again every million years or so because that’s the nature of the Cosmos. Climate change, I suspect, has very little to do with the activity of humans.
But already the Chancellor, in his Budget, has threatened laws by 2009 to tax plastic bags if shops do not do more to charge for their use.
He also drove another nail into the coffin of the great British pub with a six per cent hike in alcohol duty – more on that in my next posting.
Back to those free placcy bags. It can’t be long before the overbearing British State just steams in with an outright ban – just as it did with smoking and hunting with hounds.
And once again local councils will be only too willing to act as enforcers – by recruiting jobsworths for yet another level of petty officialdom, like the unsmiling Parking Stasi in their sinister uniforms and the Smoking Ban Nazis who inspect pubs and restaurants.
Across the country, dumb-ass councillors have been jumping on the ban-the-bags bandwagon. Warren Bradley, actually, has been slow on the uptake, as you’d expect.
In Canterbury, the city council has for quite a while been tweaking the Government’s nose about plastic bags, litter, and saving the planet.
As if the ruling Labour government, drifting day by day into a form of evil Fascism Lite, needs any more encouragement to bring in yet another “though shalt not” measure to make our lives ever more inconvenient and miserable.
Dreary Joan Ruddock MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, boasted to the Canterbury city councillors that her department was already working with retailers to look at ways of reducing the number of bags entering the “waste stream”.
The “waste stream” – that’s where politicians should be dumped, and without lifejackets too.
The Government’s earnest, humourless embrace of the “plastic bag agenda” wasn’t quite enough to satisfy Canterbury ’s huffing and puffing councillors, however.
Dear me, no. They passed a motion calling for a local partnership agreement (yawn) to get retailers using other “hessian bags” or “bags for life”.
If there is a phrase in the English language that is sadder than “hessian bags” I’d like to know what it is.
What a minute, maybe the ultimate sad phrase is “local partnership agreement” since they always seem to bring about a loss of freedom and the death of creativity.
I look around at contemporary society and I see clearly that things are going sick and wrong.
It’s wrong that Merseyside Police are out in force on New Brighton front every weekend making people feel uncomfortable and filming them as they are out for a drink and a laugh.
How would the cops feel if I went out and filmed them as they went about their lawful pursuits?
It’s wrong that social landlords such as the new breed of housing associations are snooping on tenants and always telling them how to behave.
It’s wrong that most people in one way or another now work for the State.
For instance, Wirral Council – the notorious "Death Star" which has presided over so much decline in Wallasey and Birkenhead – has 13,000 people on the payroll by its own admission, including some very highly paid fat cats at the top levels.
But if you take into account all the publicly-funded partner organisations of the council, and the bloated NHS locally, I believe the real figure for State employment on Wirral is fantastically high.
I'm quite sure that borough is now on a par with Scotland – where 60 per cent of the working population is in the employ of the State.
"Statism" on that scale can only lead ultimately to terrible social control.
A new form of Fascism, in fact; one born out of Liberalism and Socialism after people had forgotten the importance of freedom.
Thankfully, some of us will always champion freedom.
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Carl Myers wrote...
Great blog. I used to post on shortpoints but would get hammered by all the loony left and didnt get any posts of support.
Keep up the good work - we need more conservatives or even just rational voters to rid us of the evil scourge that is liberalism.
REGAN REPLIED: Thanks Carl. I think it is particulalrly horrible that something born of a desire for freedom and justice - i.e. classic Liberalism - should have developed in our era into something so nasty and tyrannical.
Posted by: Carl Myers | March 13, 2008 6:05 PM