Says Eamonn Butler in The Times today, about the latest TV licence advertisement,

“It's time we citizens stood up against this state-sponsored intimidation, particularly now that anti-terror legislation is being used to spy on whether our dogs are fouling the pavement and that we're closing our wheelie-bin properly. And it's time we told our unelected officials that we don't much like “our town, our street, our home” being in their database - given their ability to lose it in the mail or leave it on laptops that they forget in the pub.”

It is more than fair comment to say that in recent years government has sought to criminalise an ever greater number of rule breaking activities and impose increasingly draconian penalties for “crimes” which though seen by the majority of the public as being worthy of some punishment are still considered by that same public as relatively  minor.  There is too much stick and not enough carrot.

“What makes Gordon Brown so popular with newspapers and voters? This may seem a strange question to ask when the Prime Minister has just suffered the worst local election defeat since the early 1980s and faced the most humiliating headlines since the collapse of John Major's economic policy on Black Wednesday. But considering just how disastrously Mr Brown's Government has lately been performing, the real surprise about this week's U-turn on taxes has been the mildness of the media and public response….”

 

“…Yet far from demanding Mr Brown's immediate resignation or predicting the inevitable demise of his Government, the media have mostly treated this week's U-turn as the moment when the Prime Minister's fortunes could start to recover.”

 

Anatole Kaletsky

Yes, I thought that curious, too.