Last month it was mobile phones, now its big brother electronic surveillance. Just what is happening to civil liberties in this country? I welcomed my daughter into the criminal classes last month ... she has just passed her driving test! This means she'll be in the frame to break at least one law a week and probably more as soon as she gets behind a wheel. The pc risk assessment brigade are going law crazy. If there's a problem about anything lets pass a new kneejerk law to ban it is the cry! I await with interest future laws to ban tinted windows and those dongly cds in cars which are (wrongly or rightly) reputed to blind flashing gatsos!
What the ban brigade fail to realise, which is plain as a pikestaff to anyone with half a brain , is that those who flout the law will continue to do so whatever penalties are thrown at them. When insurance premiums and road tax vastly outweigh the sums you're likely to be fined if you get caught without either its hardly surprising that some people will behave irresponsibly. Every day I encounter drivers with phones pressed to their ears, some of them negotiating dangerous junctions at the wheels of articulated lorries! They know they are now committing an offence but the attitude is one of 'well you've got to catch me haven't you?' Eating and drinking at the wheel while driving is obviously an offence but I haven't noticed any fancy new laws about that!
Truth is, when you consider the number of law enforcement officers per million members of the population, the odds in favour of you getting away with any offence from speeding to violent armed robbery are self evident. The really amazing thing is just how self regulating our society is! The fact that our civilisation has not collapsed into a free for all of bloodlust and anarchy is not down to our wonderful policemen but simply due to the fact that most of us are wise enough to uphold unwritten laws of decency and fair play, and feel angered by jumped up jobsworths who treat us as if we are naughty schoolchildren who need to be regimented for our own good. Our English common law has endured for a thousand years, because it was based not on petty regulation, but on universally perceived justice and common respect.
What worries me is how the 'nanny state' is eroding that respect. When you can be brought before a court for watching TV illicitly, using a mobile phone in a car, travelling marginally too fast, or allowing your dog to poo on a piece of waste ground it makes a mockery of our traditional perceptions of 'right' and 'wrong'. When laws, rules and regulations become petty, over numerous and unyielding to common sense breaking them becomes socially acceptable, and people who would normally be law abiding increasingly adopt an attitude of 'up yours pal!' Smokers will happily smoke in an area that says 'no smoking' simply to say 'what you going to do about it?' And if someone is authoritarian enough to make them stub out their fags, they will simply light up again after that person has gone.(and that's if they aren't smoking cannabis!) It's called human nature, which is something our bureaucrats and legislators don't seem to have heard of!
The current drug woes of the United States and the international drug culture it nurtures owes its origin to the Volstead Act, that very unwise piece of legislation that bowed to the anti alcohol lobby, and introduced the prohibition, which made drinkers go underground and gave respectability to organised crime. Government plans to outlaw smoking would have a similar effects and if you're getting your fags illegally why not try a bit of spliff or crack cocaine while you're at it? HM Government might do well to remember that it was they who introduced cigarette smoking to the masses during the Great War. Perhaps we should sue them for giving our grandparents lung cancer as well as putting them in the way of German bullets!
Then we have Tony Blair's plans to curb antisocial behaviour. HOW??!!
Real democracy is not the political platitudes of our megalomaniac rulers, but the personal freedom of the individual to do what he or she likes bound only by the understanding that we must sometimes be prepared to answer for our actions.
UNFINISHED
copyright Jim Jarratt 2004