{"id":2896,"date":"2010-07-02T16:17:12","date_gmt":"2010-07-02T16:17:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=2896"},"modified":"2010-07-02T16:17:12","modified_gmt":"2010-07-02T16:17:12","slug":"general-election-aftermath-v","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=2896","title":{"rendered":"General Election: Aftermath V"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I saw <a title=\"Daily Mail -Clegg Asks The Public\" href=\"http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-1291209\/Nick-Clegg-launches-Freedom-Bill-cut-red-tape-reduce-nanny-state.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> this article\u00a0in today&#8217;s Daily Mail<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8211; and as you will see, this precludes about 90% of the British public &#8211; would realise immediately that this is going to lead to some of the most idiotic suggestions imaginable. Not so the LibCons &#8211; it is clear that they thought they were going to get some brilliant ideas from it.<\/p>\n<p>As a brief aside, when I was stuck in the rat race &#8211; and when Teamworking\u00ae was insidiously damaging British industry without anyone having the brains to realise it &#8211; 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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s another story).<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, back to the static charging. Some clown suggested that we should put a <a title=\"Bounce\" href=\"http:\/\/www.bouncesheets.com\/en_US\/faq.jsp\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> sheet of Bounce<\/a> in with the beads to reduce the charge! The fact that this adds ingredients &#8211; which in the pharmaceutical industry is a definite non-starter &#8211; was something he was genuinely incapable of understanding.<\/p>\n<p>And so it is with The Law. According to the Mail, the suggestions people have come up with include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<blockquote>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Make prostitution and drugs legal <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">End the ban on marrying a horse <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Repeal Murder and its Related Laws <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Repeal \u2018extreme pornography\u2019 law <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Reduce child benefits for the third and subsequent children <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Abolish the law which enables you to shoot and kill a Welshman within the city walls of Chester <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Abolish the Dangerous Cartoons Act <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Repeal the Smoking Ban <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Bring back the death penalty <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Repeal all immigration laws <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Decriminalise magic mushrooms <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Scrap the Human Rights Act <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Castrate paedophiles <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Bring back hanging [there&#8217;s a surprise] <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Repeal the Official Secrets Act <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Removal all speed limits on motorways <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Repeal the 20 per cent VAT rate <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Remove IVF from the NHS <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Remove religion as a criterion for selection to state schools <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Repeal the Hunting Ban [Tory voters, eh?] <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Democratically elect a head of state <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Stop Road Tax <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Loosen regulations on hand baggage at UK Airports <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Abolish the House of Lords <\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Scrap motorcycle helmet law <\/li>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And you can bet your life that these are the more sensible ones.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">There was even a call for murder to be allowed with the justification that there were \u2018only\u2019 500 homicides a year and the cash savings on crime fighting could be used to keep jobs in the public sector&#8230; <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>See what I mean? Mind you, Minnie Mouse (aka Nick Clegg) is still upbeat:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The \u2018best suggestions\u2019 will form part of the Freedom Bill to be published in the autumn. <\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Inviting people to nominate laws they wanted repealed, Mr Clegg said: \u2018What I find especially exciting about this project is that, now we have got the ball rolling, the debate is totally out of government&#8217;s control. <\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Real democracy is unspun &#8211; it is the raucous, unscripted debates that always throw up the best ideas. <\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">\u2018So be demanding about your liberty, be insistent about your rights. This is about your freedom and this is your chance to have your say.\u2019 <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The man is on a different planet. Here we have a society where dumbing down has become one of\u00a0the biggest obstacles to future development and growth, and <em>he<\/em> tries to turn Government and Law into a primary school competition for &#8220;the best suggestion&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I saw this article\u00a0in today&#8217;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 &#8211; and as you will see, this precludes about 90% of the British public &#8211; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-related"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2896\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}