The Limits of the State

You may never have noticed, but Switzerland doesn't have a President. Or a Chancellor. In fact, the Swiss Head of State is, collectively, the seven-person Federal Council. It's worked this way since 1848, and the seven between them run just about everything a central State should run. The Swiss people make sure the central State doesn't get too ambitious by limiting the amount of tax-take they can spend - about 30%. The other 70% is determined and managed locally.

You see, there's no causative link between a nation's level of taxation and the size and power of the central State, a fact that bypasses Polly Toynbee completely. Shocked by the damage that Snowden's revelations may do to the image of the benign and all-powerful central State, Lady Toynbee leaps to the defence of the Megastate. "Labour needs to hymn the good the state does and the civilising value of what taxes buy – health, education, safety, proud public spaces. All the things that people value most." Toynbee pompously proclaims, blind to the reality that the Swiss enjoy better health, education, safety and higher quality public spaces than we do, with a much much smaller central State and highly constrained taxation.

People have a perfect right to grant their governments the power to snoop on their emails, browsers and tweets - but this must be a choice openly made, with the power always to withdraw or reverse the consent. Such consent has been noticeably absent in this case.

Central Banking State

The baleful and malign Central State is nothing if not cunning in seeking its own preservation at the taxpayer's expense. Whilst Osborne's austerity cuts have been concentrated on the most visible and proximate services to the general public - police, fire, health, libraries, swimming pools and the like - the jobs of the 2.36m employees of the Central State seem to have remained wholly intact.But have they?

I'm tempted to cut and paste the entire list of 2,420 central government bodies making up the total, as used by the Office of National Statistics, but will leave you to download the .xls file if you've a mind. But what struck me most is the extent in the State accounts of the banking sector; not only the entire Bank of England, Banking Department and Issues Department, but also 

ABN Amro Bank NV
Adam and Company plc
AMC Bank Ltd
Bank of Scotland plc
Black Horse Ltd
Coutts & Co
Lloyds Bank (BLSA) Ltd
Lloyds Banking Group plc
Lloyds TSB Bank plc
Lloyds TSB Private Banking Ltd
Lloyds TSB Scotland plc
Mortgage Express (England)
National Employment Savings Trust Corporation (NEST)
National Westminster Bank plc
Northern Ireland Central Investment Fund for Charities
Northern Rock plc
Royal Bank of Scotland Group plc
Royal Bank of Scotland plc, The
Scottish Widows Bank plc
Ulster Bank Ireland Ltd
Ulster Bank Ltd

I'd almost forgotten that Coutts, the Queen's bank, had been nationalised. Likewise the BOS. In the 'years of bitter wrangling over Scotland's future' to come I can see the future of Scotland's nominal banks as playing no insignificant part - if only to get them off the English books.

Time to sack the mandarins

With news that the civil service is doing what the civil service always does - smile and assure ministers, then take no notice whatsoever of ministerial instructions - the time has come to introduce a new 'performance bonus' for our most senior mandarins. The deal is this; if you fail to reduce your workforce by 10% a year, you get the sack. Simples. 


Breaking Whitehall's stranglehold on the country was never going to be easy. The civil service is the staunchest defender of the Leviathan central State, and will never willingly give up a nanogram of power. To break its grip, Cameron will need to be ruthless - and he will have the support of the country. Sacking the mandarins may leave us with a short-lived administrative mess, but it will be worth it. 


C'mon Dave - have you got the balls for it or not?

The State Play Directorate

A letter to Nick Clegg from a body called 'London Play' has just come to my attention. London Play is one of those fake charities funded by London Councils (i.e. me) and the Lottery, and its trustees patrons include Chris Smith, Polly Toynbee, Jon Snow and Simon Hughes. Nuff said.

Labour devised something called the 'National Play Strategy' incredible as it seems; even conkers and hopscotch were not immune from Labour's regulatory lust. At the heart of this was the anodyne claim that 'Children have a right to play' which swiftly translated itself in Statist minds to 'The State has a duty to provide play'. Which of course is nonsense.

For millennia children have created play environments from the environment around them; a threshing floor became a gladiatorial arena for Roman kids, a timber fence a tournay field for mediaeval youngsters and a coal bunker a battle tank for me, my commander's seat a milk-crate. For girls it was easier; any flat surface was a kitchen, and pretend fare was served plentifully and with great imagination. For exploring we had the bronze-age tumuli and woods nearby, decaying barns and farm buildings, weekend building sites and fascinating derelict places.

Today it seems such things must be designed and staffed by the State. First they create the scare - of kiddy-fiddlers, of gangs armed with flashing knives, of packs of child-eating dogs - that discourage parents from letting their children out to play. Then they point out that kids are becoming fat and indolent. Then they implement State Play; gender-neutral, unchallenging, bland and very, very safe. Staffed by Play Workers all with enhanced CRB checks. All at enormous public expense.

So these Statists are now accusing the government of causing 'play deprivation' because the State isn't funding any more Wobbly Chicken Supervisors. Around £100m in capital provision has also been cut this year - but Toynbee, Smith, Snow et al don't seem to have picked up on the implications of this.

You see, the people the government are hitting hardest are not children at all, not even the State play sector. It's actually the private manufacturing and construction sector that bears the brunt of the cuts - the firms who make and install the new playgrounds. The speed of the programme cancellations has left them with unsaleable stocks and workforces geared up to roll out a second year of 'Playbuilders' across the country. They're now offering playgrounds to private developers at rock-bottom prices. Every cloud, as they say, has a lead-coloured lining.

Squealing Mandarins squirm to save their troughs

Cameron's lead in walking to the Commons and jumping on a bus home is causing panic amongst the bloated functionaries at the heart of the Leviathan State. Senior mandarins, virtually unknown to the public let alone to a primitive Bradford Jihadist with a Grade D GCSE in English, have long cited 'security concerns' to excuse a munificent lifestyle of chauffeured cars and a closeted and protected existence far removed from contact with the citizens they rule. Cameron's behaviour may actually force these delicate orchids (Bateman-like shock) to take the tube to work.

Naturally, this weekend they are launching a concerted but anonymous campaign in the press to save their troughs by outlining the 'grave security risks' that Cameron is facing; their excuse for their own cosseted lifestyle lies in convincing their political puppets of their own importance in security terms.

Although these bloated plutocrats are actually at more risk of having their heads sawn off by an outraged taxpayer than by a Jihadist, and the security they erect around themselves nought more than pointless vain puffery and flam, expect them to fight this one viciously.

ACPO chiefs should be jailed

The senior police officers who run the sinister and shadowy ACPO, a malignant mafia that casts the blight of a Stasi State on us all, belong in jail for contempt of court.

ACPO have advised all police forces not to start destroying DNA samples when they have been required to do so by the ECHR. Their advice is in contempt of that court's judgement.

If we allow policemen even once to defy the orders of the court, even a European court, without retribution then we will have lost one of our most fundamental securities.

It is time that the capi of this repressive gang were arrested, handcuffed and sent to reflect in the cells on the consequences of trying to usurp democratic civil authority.

The four 'C's

Marcel Berlins writes in the Guardian this morning in protest at the government's describing the recipients of lawyers' services as 'customers' and not as 'clients'. Of course. The abolition of traditional business relationships is at the heart of social engineering.

Remember the four 'C's; citizens, clients, customers and consumers. The balances of power, and the formality, and the legal status of business relationships used to be clearly defined by the customary use of such terms. Lawyers and banks had clients, restaurants had customers, supermarkets had consumers and the State had citizens. Client relationships often enjoyed legal privilege, customer relationships implied a personal recognition between service provider and recipient, consumer relationships gave pre-eminence to spending power and citizens were the masters of the State. No longer.

The banks lost their clients and changed them for customers when they stopped addressing my letters to Raedwald Uffinga Esq, sometime around big bang, and shortly before my account was managed by a young woman in Mumbai. The government swapped citizens for customers when it adopted the banal and deceitful fulsomeness of commerce in its relationship with us; customers have far less power than citizens, and are always to be preferred by the State. And now, as Berlins complains, using a lawyer will be no different from employing a plumber (and probably cheaper), and customers can whinge to a call-centre about ineptly jointed contracts, or trusts that leak, or divorces that leave a wet mess on the floor.

Well, tough. The legal profession has willingly become amateur and second-rate over the past few decades in its rush to comply with the State's agenda to de-professionalise it. Now it must live with the consequences.

Civil servants 'sexed up' Home Office leaks

Call it sexing up, call it an economy with the verité, call it hyperbole, call it any one of a dozen euphemisms for lying, but the truth is that our senior civil servants can't stop themselves doing it.

This time they've lied to the Met police about the nature of the leaks allegedly from Christopher Galley at the Home Office. Chris Wright, a senior Cabinet Office civil servant, wrote to the Met saying there had been 'considerable damage to national security' from the leaks. There had not. It was not true. It was a lie. Mr Wright lied to the Met police. How do we know? Because the Home Affairs select committee has published a report that uncovers the facts, and thank God they have.

All politicians are incorrigible liars. It goes with the territory. Combine their inherent inbuilt mendacity with a culture of lies at the top of the civil service and you have a recipe for national disasters such as Blair's Iraq War.

It's not only the culture of greed, self-interest, sleaze and corruption in Parliament that's in need of urgent reform, the top of our civil service is also as rotten as week-old mackerel. They will fight like jackals to preserve the Leviathan central State they have helped build over the past thirty years - and lie, spin, distort, omit and misrepresent the truth to keep it. The time when we could trust a single word the mandarins say is long gone. They are part of the problem.

Jack Straw and Bridget Prentice defend death cover-ups

If you meet your death at the hands of the State, whether shot by our paramilitary police, drowning in your own vomit in a police cell, butchered by an incompetent hospital doctor or blasted to pieces by our American allies whilst serving with the army, the law requires that a Coroner with a Jury hears evidence of your death and adjudges culpability. It is our ultimate safeguard against the capriciousness of the State. And it's one that Straw and Prentice want to abolish. They favour secret inquests that would allow police assassinations to be swept under the carpet, with press and public kept in the dark.

I'm not convinced that the story in this morning's Telegraph is correct - that this is all being done at the behest of the US. We're now all aware of the lies that the Foreign Secretary told our courts about the US being responsible for the government not presenting torture evidence, so could they not be lying now about this? Following McFool's frequent blaming of the US for his own financial incompetence, it seems the government are making our Cousins the whipping-boy for every failure, cover-up and malfeasance of their own.

This is far more likely to have been cooked-up by a poisonous cabal of ministers and civil servants for whom not embarrassing the State is genuinely more important than accounting for the lives of our fellow citizens.

For those who doubt the growing disquiet over a 'police state'

Take a look at the comments on the BBC's 'Have your say' (H/T An Englishman's Castle).

Hardly an overwhelming endorsement of the intrusive State, are they?

Yes, I know lots of people write to their MP asking for CCTV cameras. What they're actually asking for is better local policing. To offer this as evidence that the population supports the intrusive State is a little disingenuous. And with the airline pilots - hardly members of the tinfoil-hat brigade - set to refuse to be ID card salami this hardly bodes well for something the government claims has widespread support.

My work brings me into contact with a very broad spectrum of people, both socially and politically. I can't recall one who wants more State snooping, more prodnoses, more databases or more draconian laws (except, it must be said, for dog fouling - the majority of ordinary people in the UK seem to support summary lynching for dog owners who don't 'pick up').

I need to go through the recent opinion polls to collate more evidence on this, but my own experience is of a growing disquiet at the growth of the intrusive State.

And so it starts .....

The central State is inherently weak. Those at the centre of the State know this better than the civil population, and this knowledge makes them fearful and paranoid. Every shadow is a threat, every blog an enemy, each dissenter a potential terrorist. As Willem Buiter wrote in the FT:

Every restriction on our liberties - our right to speak, write, criticize and offend as we please, to act and organize in opposition to the government of the day, to embarrass it and to show it up by forcing it to look into the mirror of its own leaked secrets - must be resisted. We cannot afford to believe any government’s protestations that it is acting in good faith and will safeguard the confidentiality of any information it extracts from us. Public safety and national security are never sufficient reasons for restricting the freedom of the citizens. The primary duty of the state is to safeguard our freedom against internal and external threats. The primary duty of an informed citizenry is to limit the domain of the state - to keep the government under control and to prevent it from becoming a threat to our liberties.

The threat posed by our own government to our liberty and fundamental rights is a constant one. Most of the time it is a much greater, direct and immediate threat than that posed by foreign states (through conquest or extortion) or by external non-government agents, the violent NGOs like Al Qaeda.

2009 will see violent upheaval in Greece, Spain and Italy as the fall-out from their membership of the single currency hits. The EU will be fighting for its survival as a putative Federal State - and it will fight. The legislation is in place for a Greek magistrate to extradite any one of us should we be seen as adding to the threat posed by their own people on their own streets; Europe wide jurisdiction is now a reality. You can all forget Magna Carta.

Both France and Germany - the EU's spine - will become increasingly repressive in defence of the EU under threat. The Guardian reports today that nine French 'anarchists' who sound more like modern hippies have been seized by anti-terrorist police from the small Limousin village (incredibly with a communist Mayor) that they had settled in. The French government says they posed a threat to the State; they say they were just being anti-State hippies and wanted to be left alone. We will see much more of this throughout Europe during 2009 as the EU feels threatened by its unwilling citizens. Any UK libertarian blogger who campaigns in their defence could see themselves the subject of an extradition warrant from the French examining magistrate; no longer can we stand safely in our realm and comment on the excesses of mainland Europe.

I've mentioned before that we are going through changes of the magnitude of those of 1830 - 1860. A period of fundamental political reform that will be resisted by the established but dying parties, the Statist civil service and those whom Peter Oborne calls the Political Class. British good sense avoided the blood spilt on the continent in the 19th century, and my most fervent wish is that we can do so again. However, the baneful grasp of the evil fronds of the EU on our nation may mitigate against this.

No, I'm not wearing a tinfoil hat or hearing voices. We're so used to political stability, so indoctrinated with the supremacy of individual rights, that anything else is incomprehensible. Everyone forgets that all those rights, rights of expression, of assembly, of thought and conscience, and rights of privacy are expressly caveated so that they only exist insofar as they don't threaten the State. The European Convention on Human Rights is actually the Convention on the Rights of European States over the People of Europe; just read carefully the second clauses of Articles 8, 9, 10 and 11 HERE.

And as the nine hippies of Tarnac are finding, one doesn't actually have to pose a real threat to the State - it's enough for the paranoid and weak central State to believe that you might.

State makes further provision to take direct control of police

Throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, police forces were very much local institutions under the control of local bodies. The borough forces were under tight local democratic control, but the newly-formed county forces that caught up with them were less so.

The Home Office has long yearned for direct control over the nation's police forces; it failed to get the borough forces in the 1850s (strongly locally resisted), got a greedier taste for more control from wartime emergency powers, and tried from 1919 to 1964 by a variety of methods (using variously 'efficiency', 'economy' and 'national security' as unsuccessful excuses) to do so. The 1960 Royal Commission was steered by the Home Office to reflect a centralist outcome, and the 1964 Police Act was the result. Strong local borough control was abolished, and weak structures based on the old county models of governance were instituted, mostly with a Police Authority left in place with some residual functions including the appointment of senior officers.

The Home Secretary is now preparing to seize even those limited functions left to local police authorities. Not only is she not 'minded' to explore greater democratic control, she is proposing to give herself powers to act with ACPO to determine all police appointments above Chief Superintendant rank in all police forces. As a sop she is inviting the Association of Police Authorities to send a representative to sit on her appointments panel, but there is no doubt she is effectively neutering the sole remaining power of individual police authorities.

The amendments are contained in s.2 of the Policing and Crime Bill.

As always with Liebour, this is being spun as 'increasing public accountability'; in a risible and cynical insult to police authorities that will now be bereft of their sole remaining power, they will be required to take into account the views on policing of local people - which will be 'more, please' - to continue to raise even higher taxes locally to pay for the Home Office's police forces.

It's a good con, isn't it? The Home Office sets targets for operational police activity that means they don't have the resources to meet the public's expectations by attending burglaries and the like, the public's demands translate into 'more police, please' and local working people pay more for even more police activity directed by the Home Office that doesn't meet the public's expectations ....

Time is long overdue for a new Royal Commission on policing; many serving police officers are now also calling for this. The terms of reference must not make the mistake as in 1960 of placing the Commission under a rigid Home Office agenda.

We are sleepwalking towards a national police force under central State control. The whole political class and a dangerously Statist civil service are manipulating us towards this outcome - one I'm sure the English people don't want.

Please add your voices to the call for a Royal Commission on policing.

OUTRAGE!

The manner of the arrest and detention of Damian Green, and of the searching of his Commons office, is an outrage.

Firstly, the Metropolitan police, OUR police force, not Zanu Labour's, won't come out any more for a burglary. Your home can be trashed, a lifetime of belongings stolen, your world turned upside down and these clowns invite you to leave a message on an answerphone. Nearly thirty teenage boys have been vilely murdered this year, yet a London bus will still contain an upper deck of kids armed with knives. Illegals and overstayers steal millions from the public purse and by fraud and other acquisitive crime and they're not interested. Yet they turn out in force to arrest an MP who has cruelly exposed Home Office incompetence. Unacceptable. This is the moment when it has become imperative that London regains control of its police force. I and council tax payers in my borough are paying the salaries of a thousand policemen, and I want to see them here, on the buses, on the streets, not hidden in the thousands of Zanu Labour 9 to 5 'units' and made-up non-jobs that the Met has become.

I am writing today to the Acting Commissioner to demand, under FOI rules, to know the name of the senior Met officer who authorised the Green arrest, and to know just how many hours and how much manpower has been devoted to this investigation.

Secondly, Parliament. There are a few of my readers I know who mistake Parliament for Government. And I have been critical and am critical of the behaviour of MPs as a class. However, the privileges of the Commons are our most precious asset - forget for a moment the crass ineptitude, venality, avarice and petty corruption of many of the chamber's current members and think ahead to the day when the Commons is filled with our true representatives locked in pitched battle with a trenchant and besieged government - the preservation of those ancient privileges is critical.

I know little of Mrs Jill Pay, the current Sergeant At Arms who apparently authorised the violation of the house's privileges in the searching of Green's office. She is a career civil servant of the clerical and executive branch by her scanty online CV, and doesn't come to the house from any position of achievement. However, I am certain that the last Sergeant, Major General Peter Grant Peterkin, would not have allowed such access to the house without the assembled Commons having a say in the matter.

There is a reason sometimes why our traditions seem a bit stuffy and non- Zanu Labour and General Peterkin is it; the Sergeant needs to be a man (or a woman of the Margaret Rutherford type) who can tell the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis to get lost. A general can do this as easily as breathing; a former clerical officer with no history of command or responsibility can't.

Thirdly, I cannot believe that the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, was not informed of the arrest and search. I am sure astute questioning today and over the coming days will reveal this obvious truth. The police don't even arrest an MP for shoplifting without the Home Secretary being told.

This outrage is a watershed. It is an outrage perpetuated by the agents of the State against one of the people's elected representatives. Any personal shortcomings that Damian Green may have are irrelevant; it's the symbolism of the line crossed. I am furious. I am seething. And following the post below, I am wondering more seriously what will be demanded from all of us who hold our social democracy dear to keep it from such vile dangers.

Workplace Parking Levy - FOI requests

Nottingham's proposals to charge businesses up to £350 a year for each workplace parking space they have may well be copied by councils across the country. But before they get too excited about it, I urge readers to submit a request under the Freedom of Information Act to their local council, asking

1. How many workplace parking spaces are maintained for council staff and councillors?
2. How much does the council pay annually to subsidise staff and councillor workplace parking permits or 'season tickets' in public car parks?

Similar requests to government departments and quangos may also uncover the extent of the State's 'Do as I say, not as I do' approach to this issue.

When Nottingham Council can tell us that all of their staff and councillors use public transport to get to and from work, their proposal may be met a little more sympathetically.

Beware the prophets of doom

The papers are crawling again with senior plods and Statist politicians blaming all the evils of modern Britain on alcohol. 'Beer cheaper than water' trumpet the tabloids, conveniently forgetting that for centuries beer was actually safer than water, and small beer - that is, weak beer - was given to schoolboys to drink for breakfast before tea became dominant. No doubt the next budget will see substantial increases in alcohol duty as a result.

The anti-drink campaigners will inevitably produce statistics showing the relentless rise in alcohol consumption since the 1950s, so it was with some pleasure that I found this little gem of a graph, of UK per capita alcohol consumption from 1900 - 2000. We're actually drinking the same amount of alcohol as we drank in 1908. Phooeee.

Alcoholic drinks to carry health warnings from next year

The Daily Record carries this story today:

TWO drunken Scotswomen were kicked off a flight from Spain yesterday after attacking an air steward. The pair were part of a group of 11 returning from a hen weekend in Majorca to Glasgow on an easyJet flight. Trouble flared when one of the party was told she was too drunk to fly. Her friend then launched a vicious attack on the male steward, leaving him needing hospital treatment. The pair, who have not been named, were hauled off the flight and quizzed by Spanish police at Palma airport. And they will now have to make their own way back to Scotland from the holiday destination.

Last night, one passenger said: "This group of women were drunk and completely out of order. They should never have been let on the plane".

"Hell Bonnie, ma heid hurts. D'ya think they'd give us an Irn Bru?"
"Och Fiona, if only those bottles of Bailey's had a health warning on them advising us of our safe drinking limits; we'd never have ended up in a Spanish nick."
"Ach weel. They'll let us out soon enough. Good job we're pregnant, eh?"

Charles Moore and the paradox of Human Rights

In a piece in the Telegraph on Saturday, Charles Moore alluded to on the conflict between the State and our intermediate institutions, and the paradox of the reach of our Human Rights laws in eroding our essential freedom.

The authority of families and intermediate institutions will always be weak when the State is strong, and vice-versa.

The ethos of the regiment has been the strength of the British army since the eighteenth century. As with a family, it gave protection, provision, identity and pride; in return it demanded loyalty and obedience. It was a self governing, self regulating unit with its own laws and customs, an institution that enjoyed a high degree of devolved authority, beyond the pallid damp clasp of civil servants and politicians. It trained men for success in war. Soldiers put their 'human rights' on hold when they sign-up - and never mind the 'right of free speech', the essential paradox of war is that those who fight it recognise that the 'right to life' that is the basis of Human Rights law can only be upheld by men who are prepared to die in its defence.

As with the regiment, so with other institutions; the Navy, the Church, our professional bodies, the police. Many others. The strength of institutions lies in the extent to which their members subjugate their individual 'rights' to the authority of the institution. And as with institutions, the authority of the family.

A State that offers a direct relationship with every individual recognises no authority other than its own, and no framework other than a myth of freedom and liberty based on the absolute rights of the individual. Your sergeant-major is rude to you? Take him to court for bullying. Your parish congregation doesn't support your public transvestism? Claim your right in law. Your Chief Constable doesn't like you appearing in porn films? Assert your right to free speech. Your mother smacks you? Prosecute her for assault.

When you lose the authority of institutions, you lose something infinitely precious to freedom; you lose the opportunity for any devotion, any attachment to anything other than yourself. You lose the opportunity for allegiance and loyalty to something intimate and close yet greater than yourself. My father loved his regiment until the day of his death, loved it with a fierce possessive pride. He sought to make its virtues his own. As Moore says, writing of the Navy,

Behind that account is a world we have lost - of unreasoning, lifelong devotion, of love for an institution above self. If you don't have that, it is only a matter of time before you don't have a navy.

Passport Fraud - hoist by their own petard

In the days when passport checks were carried out locally and in the community, fraud was rare. The application had to be signed, as did the photographs, by a person of standing in the community who knew the applicant personally; an MP, vicar or GP usually. In turn, the staff at the main Post Offices knew their identities and signatures.

It was just another small arrangement that helped cement local relationships and anchor people in families and communities.

When you tear those social structures down and replace local authority by an anonymous all-powerful central state, of course fraud is going to happen.

And will happen just as much with ID cards, it need hardly be said.

Blair and Brown's poverty of policy

In launching Blair's poisonous socialist 'legacy' , Brown is reported as saying "The next stage of improving our public services is personalised services tailored towards people's needs."

Ah yes. The direct relationship between the State and the Individual taken to the nth degree, and you can be sure that the only 'needs' the State will satisfy are those that further the sole legitimate authority of the State as arbiter of what is good, right and in pursuit of that chimera of an idealised individual 'well being' and 'liberty' that is no more than cruel and abject slavery.

That whorehound Rousseau said much the same thing;

"Each citizen would then be completely independent of his fellow men, and absolutely dependent upon the state . . . for it is only by the force of the state that the liberty of its members can be secured."

This is the most dangerous myth in politics today. By subverting and destroying the bonds with and the authority of families, communities, localities and allegiances, by devaluing and alienating our scholars, healers and priests and by replacing them all with know-all, do-all Big Government, the State destroys our liberty, our humanity, our self-reliance and inter-reliance and puts in place a deathly inhuman subjugation of the spirit and robs us of will and identity.

Cameron was spot-on at the Spring conference speaking about Labour's destruction of the NHS.

Mr Cameron said the Government failed to trust professionals to get on with their jobs because Labour was naturally "pessimistic" about human nature. "Labour have ripped the heart out of the NHS and replaced it with a computer," he said.

This drive for control over the minutae of every individual's life in the UK must be stopped. The State must shrink. Only then can the Nation grow.

Wonderful, Tony .... don't stop!

From the Indy on Sunday:-

Jailed fathers of young children can expect their families to be automatically targeted by state-sponsored nannies in a dramatic escalation of "early intervention" policies to be unveiled by Tony Blair this week.

The state should step in to turn around young lives at the first sign they are becoming blighted by crime, poverty, violence and drug abuse, Mr Blair will say.

If a parent is sent to jail, families could be given a period of "intensive home visits" by health visitors, suggest officials.

In making the state responsible for the delivery of "bespoke" packages for "at-risk" families, Mr Blair hopes to draw a dividing line between the Government and David Cameron's Tories.

He certainly will. Proof indeed that Blair is now so delusional that he imagines this ludicrous initiative will attract public support. With 17,000 more prisoners in jail than when he came to power, you'd think some small remaining element of nous might be nagging him that Big State Socialism doesn't work.