'The Land of Lost Content.....'

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

The dilemma of English politics is that conservatives are unable to vote Conservative as long as Cameron is there. The role of the Conservative Party, as the adolescent William Hague memorably said in his speech to the Tory Part conference all those years ago is ‘to roll back the frontiers of the State’. If the Tory Party is not the party of small government and libertarianism then it’s nothing.

Voters were under the impression that the Tories would get Government off their backs. They have been disillusioned very quickly.

One of the first acts of the Coalition was to adopt Labour’s dreadful Equality Act. It promised to dump Labour’s plans to empower the Police to keep records of all e-mails, phone calls etc. It hasn’t. Instead it is planning to slip these proposals through quietly. The latest dottiness coming from Kitten Heels is to give grandparents right of access to the children of divorced parents. ‘What’s wrong with that?’ you may say. Well, for starters I’m not aware that grandparents of children whose parents are not divorced have any legal right of access to them, so what’s it all about? Secondly, I can think of many good reasons why grandparents should not have legal access to their grandchildren. Interestingly, this particular piece of coat-trailing was rapidly denied ‘We were misreported’. Yeah, right!

Why do Tories of all people believe that they have the right to intrude on family life?

Labour rode roughshod over Magna Carta, especially by adopting the dreadful European Arrest Warrant. ‘To none shall we deny, nor delay, justice’. Tell that to the young lad who has spent a year in prison and two on remand awaiting trial in Greece on an EWA. It abolished the double jeopardy rule that had been in place for centuries to prevent the authorities from constantly prosecuting for the same crime. The effect is to enable the Old Bill to keep coming back until they get a result. It abolished the rule preventing evidence of ‘previous’ being given before conviction, ignoring the simple logic that the function of the court is to try the crime not the ‘criminal’ (who is not, until there is a guilty verdict).

Blair’s outrageously one-sided extradition treaty with the US, which does not require even prima facie evidence that an offence has been committed, has been used hundreds of times, but not once for its purpose of catching terrorists. Britain is reputed to have more CCTV cameras than the whole of Europe. And so it goes on.

More than 3,600 new offences were created under New Labour. There are 1,036 that are imprisonable.

It is now an imprisonable offence to allow an unlicensed concert to take place in a church hall. You can go to prison if your child fails to attend school, or if you smoke in a public place, or if you fail to obtain a passport for your pet donkey or if you are a child caught in possession of a firework at any time other than on or around November 5 or New Year's Day. Fishermen who do not ask for permission before fishing on the Lower Esk in Scotland can also be jailed, as can anyone caught importing "an unauthorised veterinary product".

Among the offences created in the past five years, though not necessarily imprisonable ones, are disturbing a pack of eggs when instructed not to by an authorised officer; offering for sale a game bird killed on a Sunday or Christmas Day; attaching an ear tag to an animal when it has previously been used to identify another animal; landing a catch which includes unsorted fish at a harbour without permission; selling types of flora and fauna not native to the UK, such as the grey squirrel, ruddy duck or Japanese knotweed.

What have the Tories done about these frightening attacks on civil liberties? Well, they dumped the ID card and.......er, that’s it.

The most worrying aspect is that nobody seems to care, as the lack of response to this piece will show.

There are fools who say ‘If you’ve done nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about’. Believe me, it’s when you have done nothing wrong you have everything to worry about.

And once AV has been nodded through the same old clique will be firmly perched on the Magic Roundabout and there will be nothing the people can do about it.

Then it will be fixed-term Parliaments so that if the Government fails you will not be able to throw the rascals out. On the old philosophy that ‘if you don’t like my principles I have others’, one lot of political shysters will do deals with another lot and continue more or less as before, never mind that this produces a government that the majority never voted for.

This will bring UK into line with the continentals; there they refer to ‘liberty’ as something granted by governments. The English regard ‘freedom’ as their right.

Not for much longer. It is sleep-walking into ‘1984’. Who cares?

Barmy Britain.

In the House of Commons last week a Jewish MP was forced to apologise for referring to another Jewish MP as a Jew.

The Queen’s English.

A media report tells us that the Libyan army has been ‘attrited’.