I saw this article in today’s Daily Mail.
A few weeks ago, this new Mickey Mouse coalition government was all excited about its brilliant new idea of asking the public which laws it thinks need changing. Anyone with half a brain – and as you will see, this precludes about 90% of the British public – would realise immediately that this is going to lead to some of the most idiotic suggestions imaginable. Not so the LibCons – it is clear that they thought they were going to get some brilliant ideas from it.
As a brief aside, when I was stuck in the rat race – and when Teamworking® was insidiously damaging British industry without anyone having the brains to realise it – the company I was working for had a Suggestion Scheme. As the manager of one of the departments the suggestions came from and related to, I was on the committee which evaluated them.
The company I worked for was in pharmaceuticals, and one of the products it made consisted of small beads of drug substance in hard gelatin capsules. The beads were made separately, and were notorious for becoming statically charged once dry. The charge was so severe that you could easily get 50-100kg of the things stuck in a hopper and refusing to fall vertically downwards under the force of gravity (as a further aside, it had to be one of the most idiotic formulations ever devised. But that’s another story).
Anyway, back to the static charging. Some clown suggested that we should put a sheet of Bounce in with the beads to reduce the charge! The fact that this adds ingredients – which in the pharmaceutical industry is a definite non-starter – was something he was genuinely incapable of understanding.
And so it is with The Law. According to the Mail, the suggestions people have come up with include:
- Make prostitution and drugs legal
- End the ban on marrying a horse
- Repeal Murder and its Related Laws
- Repeal ‘extreme pornography’ law
- Reduce child benefits for the third and subsequent children
- Abolish the law which enables you to shoot and kill a Welshman within the city walls of Chester
- Abolish the Dangerous Cartoons Act
- Repeal the Smoking Ban
- Bring back the death penalty
- Repeal all immigration laws
- Decriminalise magic mushrooms
- Scrap the Human Rights Act
- Castrate paedophiles
- Bring back hanging [there’s a surprise]
- Repeal the Official Secrets Act
- Removal all speed limits on motorways
- Repeal the 20 per cent VAT rate
- Remove IVF from the NHS
- Remove religion as a criterion for selection to state schools
- Repeal the Hunting Ban [Tory voters, eh?]
- Democratically elect a head of state
- Stop Road Tax
- Loosen regulations on hand baggage at UK Airports
- Abolish the House of Lords
- Scrap motorcycle helmet law
And you can bet your life that these are the more sensible ones.
There was even a call for murder to be allowed with the justification that there were ‘only’ 500 homicides a year and the cash savings on crime fighting could be used to keep jobs in the public sector…
See what I mean? Mind you, Minnie Mouse (aka Nick Clegg) is still upbeat:
The ‘best suggestions’ will form part of the Freedom Bill to be published in the autumn.
Inviting people to nominate laws they wanted repealed, Mr Clegg said: ‘What I find especially exciting about this project is that, now we have got the ball rolling, the debate is totally out of government’s control.
Real democracy is unspun – it is the raucous, unscripted debates that always throw up the best ideas.
‘So be demanding about your liberty, be insistent about your rights. This is about your freedom and this is your chance to have your say.’
The man is on a different planet. Here we have a society where dumbing down has become one of the biggest obstacles to future development and growth, and he tries to turn Government and Law into a primary school competition for “the best suggestion”.