Among the terms some workers from countries such as Burma, the Philippines and Poland can't follow are 'nil by mouth', 'doing the rounds' and 'bleeping a doctor'.
The Mail's incomparable Richard Littlejohn has been New Labour's most perceptive critic.
Now he has written a book excoriating the political pygmies and crooks who've wrecked Britain over the past 13 years.
On Saturday, in this brilliant series, he gave us the extraordinary revelation that he nearly became a Labour MP.
Here, he explains how the diversity Nazis have ruined our town halls ... Thirteen years of New Labour rule have made our lives a misery where it matters most to us - on our unswept streets and in our own bin-cluttered backyards.
We all depend on the services provided by local councils, yet these days they are run for the benefit of those who work there, not for the people who pay for them.
Life under New Labour: 'Dancing banned in dance halls, incense outlawed in church and bodies in uncollected bins'
When I started out in journalism in Peterborough many years ago, the leader of the local council was an engine driver called Charlie Swift, who ran the city in his spare time and didn't receive a penny from the ratepayers in either salary or expenses.
He wasn't universally popular. Round town he was known as 'That Bugger Swift'.
But the streets were clean, the parks immaculate, the corporation buses ran on time, the roads were in good repair, the schools had a pretty decent record, the car parks were free and the dustbins were emptied twice a week.
That was all anyone wanted from their local authority.
But where once the council chamber contained butchers, bakers and builders, we now have a generation of full-time councillors who have never held down a proper job in their lives.
They get lavish expenses and allowances, while the old breed of town clerk with a sense of duty has been replaced by 'chief executives' who pretend they are employed to run major commercial organisations and expect to be paid accordingly.
Out went frugal 'ways and means' departments, devoted to keeping costs down. The parks committee became the 'leisure and amenities' directorate. The sanitation department morphed into 'environmental health'.
'We can't afford this circus of taxpayer-funded excess'
There was a recruitment and spending spree, which would do justice to a sailor on shore leave.
And so we arrived where we find ourselves today - with grandiose council 'cabinets', vast PR departments, local authorities with foreign policies and anti-nuclear zones,'diversity' directorates and 'carbon footprint' committees.
Over the years, I've made a good living pillorying this never- ending carnival of politically motivated profligacy. I've had enormous fun with the insane jobs - lesbian self-defence instructors, transgender policy co-ordinators, nuclear-free zone inspectors - invented by councils to expand their empires and devour our taxes.
These days I tend towards rage. Now more than ever, with the economy going to hell in a handcart, we simply can't afford this circus of taxpayer-funded excess.
Skilled craftsmen, chartered accountants, chemists, bank staff, estate agents and investment analysts have all made the long trek to the job centre. But there's one lucky group of people who have no such worries about losing their livelihoods.
While private companies are either contracting or going to the wall, Britain's five-a-day co-ordinators, diversity managers, equality officers, elf 'n' safety enforcers and carbon-footprint campaigners can all sleep easily in their beds.
The public sector continues to party like it's 1999. There's been no shake-out in the town halls, no Christmas parties cancelled in quangoland.
This is what Gordon Brown really means when he boasts about 'investment'. It's his reckless spending, putting 800,000 more people on the public payroll, which has left Britain the worst equipped of all industrialised countries to deal with the downturn.
We are now two nations. While millions of people in the competitive sector of the economy stare down the barrel of redundancy, the feather-bedded inhabitants of Brown's bloated client state are insulated from the realities of his economic mismanagement.
Gordon Brown's reckless spending has left Britain the worst equipped of all industrialised countries to deal with the downturn
Newly invented non-jobs include a £41,000-a-year 'promoting healthy weight' adviser in Lewisham and a £19,000-a-year 'temporary mass participation' worker in Bromsgrove.
Mid-Suffolk has recruited a development officer to teach juggling to youngsters. Fife has a cheerleader and a 'teen funk' instructor.
When the Government announced plans to encourage people to abandon their cars and walk to work, I predicted that it would spawn a whole new job creation scheme.
Within weeks, the Guardian was running adverts for 'community walking coordinators'.
This non-stop recruitment drive at our expense has gone through a number of different phases. There was the great AIDS scare, when no self-respecting council could bear to be without an army of HIV prevention workers.
At one stage, I worked out there were more people in Britain earning a good living from AIDS than were actually dying from it.
That was followed by the multiculturalism obsession, which could be satisfied only by hiring thousands of equality and diversity commissars.
'Dustmen often come as Santa Claus'In between, we've had every lunacy from real nappy coordinators to condom commandos and advisers to address the very special needs of gay alcoholics.
Today's driving force is the great global warming scam, entailing the hiring of legions of eco-warriors and enviro- crime fighters, on salaries commensurate with their self-righteousness.
More than 5,000 new jobs - and counting - have been created by local authorities to cash in on the 'global warming' hysteria and £30k seems to be about the going rate.
Town halls across Britain are estimated to have spent more than £100million recruiting an army of green warriors.
In the People's Republic of Islington, the council advertised for a 'carbon reduction adviser' on thirty grand a year. The advert read: 'Islington Council is leading the way in tackling climate change.'
You could have fooled me. Islington may be leading the way in vindictive parking enforcement, stabbing, street crime, graffiti and child molestation in council care homes. But saving the planet?
Meanwhile, in Tower Hamlets, the poorest borough in London and arguably the most deprived in Britain, 58 employees have job titles which contain the words 'climate change' or 'global warming'.
When Bedford Borough Council advertised for a climate change officer the perks included, wait for it, an 'essential car user allowance'. You couldn't make it up.
Town halls across Britain are estimated to have spent more than £100million recruiting an army of green warriors
Yet when floods swept many parts of the country a couple of summers ago, all these climate champions proved to be utterly, hopelessly, bloody useless.
When the heavens opened, it was the same old story, just as it is when it snows in the winter. No evacuation plans, no flood defences, simply the usual headless-chicken incompetence.
While we're worrying ourselves sick about 'global warming', we still haven't got a clue what to do about the weather.
None of the horde of new public servants is providing anything most people would remotely consider to be a public service.
Take the council threatening to close down burger vans, which don't offer 'healthy options'.
What gives them the right to do that? It's none of their business what people eat, especially when they can't do the jobs they are paid for, namely keeping the streets clean and emptying the dustbins?
The 'services' we pay for and depend on are appalling. Town halls employ legions of jobsworths to find out what we want to do and then stop us.
One hospital banned knitting - too dangerousThese days, they'd rather employ inspectors to rifle through your bin for the 'wrong kind' of rubbish than take it away. In many areas the dustman comes round about as often as Father Christmas.
When I was a boy we lived in a bungalow in Essex and every week the dustmen would empty our two metal bins: one for household waste, the other for the ashes from our boiler.
They'd walk round the back of the house, hoist the bins onto their shoulders and, having emptied them onto their cart, would bring them back to where they belonged, behind the coal bunker.
Strong men, doing men's work. They were admired, stock characters in popular culture.
So, how on earth did we get from there to a situation where, in Britain in 2008, there were a record 228 assaults on dustmen?
It's simple really. Recycling rules and the Stalinist zeal with which they are now enforced have the capacity to unleash the inner Basil Fawlty in us all. In Hertfordshire, an angry resident attacked a dustcart with a broom. In Southampton, armed police were called out after a greengrocer held a dustman hostage at gunpoint.
A wheelie bin that remained unemptied for three weeks turned out to contain a corpse. Refuse crews would turn up at the house in Cobham, Surrey, but it was halfway up the drive and council rules state that it must be placed on the pavement, otherwise the rubbish won't be collected.
They deemed it too heavy to move to their cart. Only when the bin was knocked over, probably by scavenging urban foxes, was the body of a 30-year-old woman revealed.
In Tower Hamlets, the poorest borough in London, 58 employees have job titles which contain the words 'climate change' or 'global warming'
You can only begin to imagine the bovine stupidity which contributed to the delay in finding the body. A corpse does tend to get a bit ripe after a few days, particularly if not wrapped securely in a regulation black plastic bin liner.
'Oi, Sid, have a butcher's at this. Looks like a dead body.'
'Why are you telling me? I'm a dustman, not a bloomin' undertaker. But we can't just leave it here. It don't half pen and ink.'
'That's a good enough reason for leaving it be. You dunno where it's been.'
But it's unfair to lay all the blame on the dustmen. They were only obeying orders. I'm surprised the killer wasn't fined for putting the body out in the wrong container on the wrong day.
It's a crying shame the town halls aren't still run part-time by engine drivers, not by self-regarding, pious Guardianistas.
Where's 'That Bugger Swift' when you need him?
For a start, I doubt Charlie would have had any truck with today's elf 'n' safety racket.
Hundreds of people from Kendal, in the Lake District, turned out for a Freddie Mercury tribute concert at a local leisure centre. As the band reached its finale, the singer urged everyone to get up and dance, whereupon the venue's manager pulled the plug on the sound system mid-song.
Dancing is apparently in breach of regulations. A spokesman for the local council said: 'We hope this did not take away the enjoyment of the event.' And another one bites the dust.
Dancing is in breach of regulationsThis was just one example of the tyranny which has grown up under Labour and from which no aspect of human activity, however harmless, however innocent, is immune.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban banned dancing because it was anti-Islamic. In Britain, the elf 'n' safety nazis are banning dancing because it's dangerous.
Nowhere is sacred. A reader told me how at a wedding in a lovely little 14-century church in a tiny village in the back of beyond, before the ceremony began, the vicar said he was obliged to tell the congregation that in the event of an emergency there were two ways of escape, through the vestry and through the main door.
How long before vicars conducting funeral services have to advise the dear departed to make sure they take all their belongings with them?
St Peter's Church, Derby, had to remove hassocks on the orders of elf 'n' safety in case someone at prayer fell off one.
It won't be long before they're insisting that all members of the congregation have to wear skateboard-style knee pads before taking communion.
And a Catholic church in Shropshire was threatened with closure after a safety report, which claimed that after 100 years, a build-up of incense smoke may have caused the air in the church to become toxic and possibly carcinogenic. Ye gods.
A crematorium in Nottinghamshire was told to remove all its memorial benches because they are three inches too low and do not comply with the Disability Discrimination Act 2005.
They all had to be replaced, at a cost of £200,000.
Who decides what is, or what isn't, an optimum height for a park bench? People come in all shapes and sizes. What kind of job is it crawling around a cemetery measuring benches and then ordering them to be removed?
One which pays £30k-plus and comes with a motor and an index-linked pension for life.
The cost of home repairs is soaring because elf 'n' safety is forcing contractors to hire scaffolding instead of using ladders for even the most minor job.
I can only think of one good reason for erecting a scaffold. And that's to string up whoever comes up with these absurd laws.
A hospital banned knitting needles just in case someone pokes their eye out. Which, of course, they never have. Another one installed dispensers of alcohol-based, anti-bacterial handwash to stop the spread of diseases and superbugs, then removed them in case alcoholics ripped them off the wall, drank the contents and poisoned themselves. Talk about foaming at the mouth.
Elf 'n' safety turned out in force at the 2009 London Marathon. As the competitors negotiated roads littered with traffic- calming measures, officials held up signs reading 'Beware, Hump' and an arrow pointing downwards.
Now that the Government has given the go-ahead for 20mph limits in all residential areas, don't be surprised if this year's marathon doesn't feature speed traps and random breath tests round every corner.
There's no end to the idiocy, especially when it concerns children. Everything from playing conkers to swimming with snorkels has been outlawed in the name of keeping our kids safe.
Building inspectors for sandcastles?After I wrote about schools banning sack races and three-legged races on safety grounds, I added that 'it'll be egg-and-spoon races next'.
Cue a barrage of letters from readers informing me that their local schools had beaten me to it.
Real eggs had been replaced with rubber eggs because of - you guessed - salmonella scares. A grandmother went to her grandson's sports day to discover him taking part in a jelly-and-spoon race.
When it comes to elf 'n' safety, even I can't make it up. Then again, I don't have to. In Fleetwood, Lancashire, the council banned hopscotch and the 'Streetscene Manager' sent cleaners out to scrub away a chalk grid on the pavement.
I thought ministers had repented when it was announced that councils were being encouraged to hire 'street football coordinators' but I was wrong.
Turns out the real purpose of these new jobsworths was not to encourage kids to play football, but to ban it.
The Communities Department sent out a 53-page memo, which included a warning that 'if not planned properly, football can be divisive and trigger conflict. Passions can get high and physical contact can easily lead to confrontations'.
That's the whole point of street football. It is to encourage boys to burn off excess energy. And if it descends into a punch-up, so what? Some of the worst fights I've ever seen have been on Sunday morning football fields. No harm done.
Except in the eyes of those meddlesome Guardianistas who want to eliminate all risk and spontaneity from every aspect of our lives. How long before they legislate on the use of jumpers for goalposts?
You won't be able to use jumpers from budget retailers because they're made by slave labour in the Third World.
Next, they will be insisting that teams reflect the gender, ethnic origin and sexuality of the surrounding area. And no one will be allowed to win, because it could traumatise the losers.
Already some seaside councils have scrapped donkey rides on the grounds of animal cruelty and Punch and Judy because it glorifies domestic violence.
How long before they get round to banning paddling and sunbathing? Building sandcastles will require a visit from the building inspectors.
Picture the scene as the members of a joint task force from Elf 'n' Safety and Child Protection are briefed for a raid on an unauthorised woodland gathering. 'Listen up, team. You had better go in disguise.'
'Why's that, guv?' 'For every bear that ever there was will gather there for certain because today's the day the teddy bears have their picnic.'
'But they don't have a catering licence or a safety certificate. If anything goes wrong we could have carnage on our hands. Food poisoning, sprained ankles, it doesn't bear thinking about.
'I want the tactical support unit beneath the trees where nobody sees them. They'll hide and seek as long as they please, cause that's the way the teddy bears have their picnic.
'And I don't want any heroics, either. If you go down to the woods today, you better not go alone. It's lovely down in the woods today, but safer to stay at home.'
'What do you want us to do, guv?' 'Watch them, catch them unaware. See them gaily gad about, they love to play and shout, they never have any care. At six o'clock their mummies and daddies will take them home to bed, because they're tired little teddy bears. That's when we move in.'
'Why wait until six o'clock, guv?' 'We suspect a major paedophile ring is operating in the area. After all, we've only got their word for it that they are mummies and daddies.
'Social services are providing armed back-up and the helicopter is on standby. So let's do it to them, before they do it to themselves.
'And, hey, hey, hey. Let's be careful out there.'
RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: I never imagined the town hall Nazis would go quite so mad
Dancing banned in dance halls, incense outlawed in church and bodies in uncollected bins. Part 2 of Richard Littlejohn's uproarious series on the Labour years.
Full Story:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1261423/RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-I-imagined-town-hall-Nazis-quite-mad.html
29 March 2010
www.dailymail.co.uk
We are used to accepting sheepishly the most implausible medical statistics, but when the RCP report into the impact of passive smoking states that more than 300,000 GP consultations and 9,500 hospital admissions result from children breathing second-hand smoke, one's credulity is strained to breaking point. How could anybody know this? And how could anybody be sure that passive smoking is responsible, among other things, for 100 per cent increases in the risks of meningitis and cot deaths and for a 35 per cent increase in middle-ear infections? Nobody could be sure of this, just as nobody could plausibly claim to know how much passive smoking by children costs the NHS in treatment (£23.3 million, according to the RCP).
And to pre-empt accusations that either ban would infringe the basic freedom of the individual, the medical establishment invokes the welfare of children as its justification. Although most car drivers don't have children as passengers, the RCP wants a ban on smoking in all vehicles because it would be easier to enforce. Even Martin Dockrell, the director of policy at the anti-smoking group ASH and one of the authors of the report, admitted yesterday that this would be an "injustice" to the drivers of cars without children in them, but added: "That injustice is completely outweighed by the current injustice of the harm that's done to kids."
There is still controversy about the effects of second-hand smoke on the health of non-smokers. Smokers who have inhaled first-hand smoke for decades without suffering any apparent damage to their own health (and such people do, believe it or not, exist) find it hard to accept that they are endangering others with their habit. One such is the artist David Hockney, who was yesterday quoted as saying: "I don't believe a word they say about passive smoking. I have smoked for 52 years and I'm still here working away very ambitiously." But even accepting that, in all probability, smoking in an enclosed space doesn't do anybody any good, it is hard to disagree with Forest, the group that lobbies on behalf of smokers' rights, when it says: "Smoking in outdoor areas poses little nor no threat to anyone's health." Professor John Britton, chairman of the RCP's Tobacco Advisory Group, implicitly accepts this when he says that the report "isn't just about protecting children from passive smoking, it's about taking smoke completely out of children's lives".
The justification for banning smoking in parks is not, therefore, that it has a deleterious effect on children's health, but that they are going to be corrupted by seeing adults puffing away. It is claimed, perhaps rightly, that children whose parents smoke are more likely to do so themselves later on – and the aim of the RCP is to arrange things so that no child ever again sees anyone with a cigarette in his mouth. Fortunately, even the RCP recognises the impossibility of enforcing a smoking ban on people in their own homes and therefore does not, for the moment, propose it. But when smoking has stopped everywhere else, the attention of the medical authorities will doubtless turn to the scandal of parents smoking at home and it will be redefined and made criminal as another form of child abuse.
Everybody now agrees that smoking is bad for you, the number of smokers has fallen dramatically in recent years, and a survey last year found that 78 per cent of people now do not allow smoking in their homes (and 47 per cent even forbid it in their gardens). The propaganda war against smoking has been immensely successful. The Government and the medical authorities are entitled to be feeling quite pleased with themselves. But they are not entitled to stamp on the liberty of the individual to indulge in a harmful habit if he so desires, and especially not to use children's health as an excuse for such persecution.
David Hockney has a point when he says that doctors have a "ghastly view of life; it's all quantative, not qualitative". "A little bit of what you fancy does you good," he goes on. "That's an old observation lost on petty, mean-spirited, dreary people who look only at figures, not at life."
The Government's School Food Trust, which carried out the research, admitted that "more needs to be done" to encourage pupils to finish eating healthy food served in canteens.
Researchers also found that starchy food cooked in fat was served more than three times a week on average – above strict guidelines.
But the trust, which was set up to drive Labour's healthy-eating campaign, insisted that lunch standards had significantly improved.
Children were more likely to choose fruit, vegetables and salad than they were five years ago, the study said, and fewer were consuming fatty food and savoury snacks.
Ministers launched a crackdown on unhealthy school meals after it emerged that pupils were regularly being fed chips and reconstituted meat, such as Bernard Matthews' Turkey Twizzlers.
The sale of high-fat and sugary food was restricted in canteens and vending machines following the disclosure.
In the latest study, researchers examined what food was chosen and eaten by almost 6,700 children at 136 primary schools in England – six months after the introduction of new mandatory nutritional standards in September 2008.
Under new legislation, every pupil should get two of their "five a day" servings of fruit and vegetables from their school lunch.
The study found three-quarters of children aged five to 11 were choosing vegetables or salad – or both – with their lunch, compared with 59 per cent in 2005.
But it also found that large amounts of healthy food went to waste.
Some 40.7 per cent of vegetables were uneaten, while 32.6 per cent of salad and 32.7 per cent of fruit was left.
By comparison, only 14 per cent of baked beans and 20 per cent of high-starch food cooked in fat was wasted.
The study said: "This suggests that more needs to be done to encourage pupils to finish eating the vegetables, salad and fruit which have been taken."
In total, around 24 per cent of pupils' food and drink was wasted, the study concluded, compared with 23 per cent in 2005.
The report said that pupils were taking and eating healthier lunches now than in 2005, and that the meals on offer had "changed substantially for the better".
Judy Hargadon, the trust's chief executive, said: "Caterers across the country deserve an enormous pat on the back for the huge shift in what's being offered to children, and for all they've done to encourage pupils to give healthier options a try.
"The figures certainly show that there's still a lot of work to do, both in fully meeting the standards across the board and in encouraging children to eat what's on their plate, but everyone involved with school food in primary schools can feel very proud of what's been achieved so far."
According to the trust's latest figures, only four-in-10 primary pupils and a third of those in secondary schools eat a cooked lunch.
Mandatory new nutrient standards mean that an average school lunch must contain at least one portion of vegetable or salad, and one portion of fruit. Fat, sugar and salt is restricted and each meal must contain minimum levels of nutrients including iron, zinc, calcium and vitamins.
Child spies will be encouraged to report their neighbours as part of the latest drive to cut thuggery and anti-social behaviour on estates.
As part of a campaign launched yesterday, youngsters will look for residents with untidy or litter-strewn surroundings and then try to persuade them to clean up their homes.
Children involved should also write to authorities to demand action against those whose houses are labelled anti-social, ministers recommended.
Big brother: Children are being urged to report cases of antisocial behaviour on estates in a campaign to prevent child crime
Using young people to target residents identified as letting the neighbourhood down 'teaches the children a sense of pride' and shows them they have the power to get things done, the Department of Communities and Local Government said.
But critics warned that anti-social behaviour on estates is routinely committed by children and recruiting school-age youngsters to report their neighbours is a recipe for intimidation.
'A plan like this can easily be milked by young people,' criminologist Dr David Green of the Civitas think-tank said. 'I worry that it would become a licence for children to harass people.'
The child spy scheme was launched by Communities Secretary John Denham and Home Secretary Alan Johnson, who called for 'an army of community champions to challenge anti-social behaviour'.
Ministers said the child spies idea had been tested in Nottingham, where volunteers had 'got young people themselves involved in challenging anti-social behaviour and learning that they do have the power to get things done'.
The Communities Department said that under the system children 'spotted problems' in their neighbourhood and then wrote letters to the authorities to demand action.
In one instance, it said young people identified untidy gardens, these residents received letters from the housing manager and 'as a result these gardens have been tidied by residents'.
Mr Denham said neighbourhoods had been transformed by volunteers and hoped 'their example can inspire many others to get involved'.
But Dr Green said: 'There is a risk here that the same people who break up your car will then complain that you have left a wreck outside your house.'
● Snoopers could be given cash rewards for identifying benefit cheats under controversial plans being drawn up by ministers. They are considering whether informers should be given a share of the money saved.
Ministers believe offering incentives for reporting cheats will be a powerful tool in the battle to tackle benefit fraud, which costs taxpayers around £1billion a year.
But privacy campaigners called the idea 'immoral and dangerous'.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249769/Children-spy-bad-neighbours.html#ixzz0f7OjiYaQ
The irony of the situation would be richly comic, were it not at the same time so profoundly offensive.
Three Labour MPs (and one Tory peer) have been formally charged with fiddling their expenses. So what defence are they seeking to use? The centuries-old Parliamentary Privilege law which allows them to speak freely in parliament.
It beggars belief. For in truth, no government in history has done more to undermine the ancient concepts of civil liberty and freedom of speech than Labour in its past 13 years in office.
Defence: Three Labour MPs and one Tory peer have been suspended over their expenses claims. They hope to use the centuries-old Parliamentary Privilege law
Perhaps because so many of these infringements on our traditional rights have been linked to the fight against terrorism, the general public - currently more preoccupied with keeping their jobs and paying bills than their civil liberties - have quietly gone along with the changes.
As a result, there's a real danger we're all going to wake up one day in a country where state control is the rule and close personal surveillance the norm to such an extent that we might as well be in communist China or Eric Honecker's East Germany.
Our emails will be read, our telephone conversations listened to and our every movement monitored by CCTV. And if we try to protest, we're likely to be bundled straight into a police cell and left there.
Do I exaggerate? I don't think so; having trained and practised as a criminal barrister before going on to writing scripts for legal dramas such as Kavanagh QC and New Street Law, I am steeped in what I learned from day one at university: that the right to silence, freedom from arbitrary arrest and the concept of innocence until proven guilty were all absolute and inviolable.
Nevertheless, two decades on I now find myself living in a country where terrorist suspects can be locked up for 28 days without any evidence, where the results of the postmortem of Dr David Kelly, the former weapons inspector, can be kept secret for 70 years and where vulnerable individuals such as Gary Mackinnon can be extradited to the United States, despite the complete absence of proper reciprocal extradition arrangements with that country.
Truth is becoming far stranger than the fiction I have spent the past ten years conjuring.
It's not quite all the Labour government's fault; the right to silence was actually eroded by the Conservative administration in 1994 which, having borne the brunt of IRA terrorist attacks for so long, passed the Criminal Justice And Public Order Act which allowed juries to infer anything they wished, including guilt, from a defendant's failure to give an account of himself.
It may sound sensible, but has there been any increase in criminal convictions? No.
Since then, however, it's been Labour doing the damage, as it certainly did with the Criminal Justice Act 2003, which gave the courts power to order a nojury trial where there was real evidence that jury tampering might take place. The first trial of this kind is now under way, ending a right to trial by jury that goes all the way back to Magna Carta.
In other words, it enshrines the right of British subjects to be the judges of their peers. Jury-less trials take it away.
The Coroners And Justice Act 2009 does similar damage to the ancient principle of coroners' inquests being held in public. The traditional understanding has been that we all have a right to know how any unnatural death occurred.
But now, if the Lord Chancellor - currently Jack Straw - so desires, a politically uncomfortable inquest can be avoided and a secret inquiry, with no jury, no publicity and no public scrutiny, held in its place.
So the next time a top government scientist is found dead in an Oxfordshire field or an innocent Brazilian is shot on the London Underground, we may never find out why.
Even freedom of speech, perhaps the most precious liberty of all, has come under attack. Once again, it's been sacrificed in the name of the fight against terror, with the creation of offences such as the 'encouragement' and ' glorification' of terrorism.
Where will it end? Such is the madness surrounding these so-called 'hate crimes' that old ladies are visited by the police for writing in objection to a Gay Pride march, while Tony Blair was investigated by the police for allegedly shouting 'f****** Welsh' at his television as he watched election results coming in.
Faced with stories like that, it's tempting to smile and think that no damage is being done. But it is. Thanks to the Terrorist Act of 2000, innocent tourists and amateur and professional photographers alike are being treated like criminal suspects by the police - simply because they are taking photographs in what have been deemed sensitive areas.
And yet conversely, the Government has absolutely no compunction about taking photographs of us just about anywhere it likes. Its traffic cameras track our journeys by car, while CCTV cameras monitor just about every step we take on foot.
When the next generation of cameras comes in, detailed enough to allow facial recognition, Big Brother will know where we are almost from the moment we step out of the front door.
As for what we get up to indoors, the vast computer currently under construction at GCHQ, designed to intercept all our emails and telephone conversations, will take care of that. It's the equivalent of the secret police steaming open private letters.
Add in serious curbs on the right to protest, the prospect of biometric passports and increasing limitations on the freedom to express one's religious preferences at work, and it is difficult to see in what sense we remain a 'free' country.
Like many, I would rather live with the moderate risk of terrorism than endure the suffocating safety of an intolerant surveillance state.
Magna Carta says: 'No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or be disseised [illegally dispossessed] of his freehold, or liberties, or be outlawed, or exiled or any other wise destroyed; nor will we not pass upon him or condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. We . . . will not deny or defer to any man either justice or right.'
Now and again in history, definitive words are written which stand good for all time. Those agreed at Runnymede don't need amending, they need implementing; before Britain forgets what true freedom is.
They are words that all MPs - not only those now seeking so cynically to hide behind their own ancient legal rights - would do well to scrutinise
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Well yet another step upon the loss of human rights. The body scanner devices have been made compulsory, first it makes me think about airplane 2, and the scanners there.
Second this is a step along a short road of loss of human rights. I am tempted to if i was going to fly, to if they want me to go to the scanner i will say ok just one moment and strip off naked, whats the difference.
I feel like a stranger in my own homeland. Theres the control of us, by the state, the stop drinking, stop smoking, stop eating so much, eat less salt, and so on.. we are in a police state, we are worse than china, we have more surveillance than china, we cant even take pictures of our own landmarks, under section 44 of the terrorism act.
These laws will NOT stop terrorism, i can see just off the top of my head, ways around it. and i am not the cleverest.
These new body scanners, there were problems with human rights and possible pedophilia, and the government said we wont do it. Isnt it a massive coincidence that there was an attack and it would have been "stopped" if these scanners were on, and they are now in.. what an amazing coincidence.
My faith has been modified by my life experience. So while i could be considered a single religion it was a basis of it. Due to my own personal faith, my knowledge, i have evolved my personal faith.
Those that follow any religion to the exclusion of everything else, thinking they are better because of this or that, just makes no sense anymore. Most religions talk about loving others, while they go around and do morally reprehensible acts.
The worst are those who have just been converted, and the ones with two faces, they preach goodness yet they dont act good. Religions have become less about the people but about a monolithic organisation only there to get more power and more money for themselves. Theres nothing wrong with beleiving in a god, but when you start to treat anyone who doesnt beleive what you beleive, then its no longer a religion but a step into zealotry and thats a small step into terrorism.
So while i do know there are powers out there in the universe, i don't worship them, since faith is reliant on absence of proof.
This has been bothering me for a few months now. Why can't people learn to think? They listen to the press, the government, giving the power to critically think into hands that want more power for themselves.
One example is the AGW, Anthropogenic global warming. There is NO evidence that it is occuring, The climate has always changed, romans grew grapes in the south of england, greenland had lots of vikings growing crops. But then the weather changed from warm, to cold.
The weather has always changed, but not always due to human influence. Many other factors have to be taken into account. Now the "models" used are worse case and in many cases they cant or wont explain how they got that 60 degree increase.. Then theres the Mann hockey stick graph, which has been shown to be faked, and so on.
But people don't want to think don't want to work it out. Same with second hand smoke, and fat, and... everything else..
No proof, yet BILLIONS are spent and earned for thise pseudo science.
Humanity Sucks. Ok, why is that you ask? Well, Several reasons, the first is Unrestrained Breeding, there are about 7 billion humans on this planet, each of these need certain resources. Food, clothing, water etc etc.
Now this poor old earth, have only a limited amount of resources, it doesnt take a rocket scientist to work out there will come a point where the planet will not be able to cope with the amount of humans on the planet.
Even now we are seeing famines and droughts, which can be linked to the use and over use of resources. Over this Christmas, There has been many adverts to save this group, wateraid, etc.. but in those areas its an unrestrained growth. Rather than working to make the area more prosperous, and reducing births, so it will be a gradual growth that the area could cope with, its have child after child, who needs more water, who's children need more water. And you get to a stage where the entire generations to come will be reliant on handouts. Now handouts are prone to corrupt governments, cheating in "administration" costs.
So while charity gives people a warm fuzzy feeling, for the most part charity doesnt work, Teaching people to live within the web of life is the KEY. Unfortunatly the West have lost that connection, Add to that religion, they say be fruitful and multiply, grow, they can't see they are compounding the problem that they are destroying the planet that their gods have made.
The answer.. I don't know.. The Solution, well the earth is starting to fight back, earthquakes, plagues, all happening to wipe humanity off the planet, add to that the childfree (whom i am one). Hopefully the wasteful ones will die out. and leave those that can live in the web of life to live with nature and not dominate it to destruction.
