Over legislated, bullied and plain lied to, all charges that can be levelled at the shambles that was elected in 1997, known as New Labour. In just nine years, Tony Blairs' governments introduced over 3,000 new laws, a rate of over one a day. This lies in contrast to the 500 new laws enacted by the Tories in the nine years prior to the New Labour experiment. Some of the new laws, originally printed in the Independent newspaper:
"It is now illegal to sell grey squirrels, impersonate a traffic warden or offer air Traffic Control services without a licence. Creating a nuclear explosion was outlawed in 1998.
Householders who fail to nominate a neighbour to turn off their alarm while they are away from home can be breaking the law. And it is an offence for a ship's captain to be carrying grain unless he has a copy of the International Grain Code on board."
Damn, I was after a couple of Grey squirrels to test the blast radius of the home-made ICBM I had knocked together in my garage Joking aside though, we have seen laws introduced that have have curbed our liberties, all in the name of our "security" which seems a catch all excuse for everything from invading Iraq, to keeping records of every e-mail, phone call and electrical correspondence we send or receive. Take the the family who was spied on by their local council, under the counter terrorism act. Were they planning to release a deadly strain of drug resistant typhoid into our water supply? Take out the Royal family? No. Poole County council used powers intended for counter terrorist surveillance to spy on a family they suspected over trying to send one of their children to a school outside of their catchment area. I doubt very much if this is the sole example of these ludicrous laws being applied for such trivial and non life threatening matters.
This brings me onto a documentary being shown on More 4 on Tuesday the 14th at ten pm "Taking Liberties" is an award winning film, showing just how far our rights, and civil liberties have been eroded since 1997. It is repeated on the 15th of July at 01:10 am.
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