Let Them Eat Brioche! (cf: Eat My Shorts!)

Until quite recently the average law-abiding, tax paying citizen didn't care much about the law, which is not the same as not caring for the law. He paid as much of his taxes as he had to, generally obeyed the law (few of us have not exceeded the speed limit, parked on a double yellow line or uttered treasonous comments about one or another of the rats who thrive in the constitutional sewers) and was content to get on with his life in the knowledge that the law was (generally) content to let him do so, as long as he let his fellows alone. What was then called 'give and take' governed social transactions and, although there was injustice and unfairness, most people were content, most of the time, to accept the status quo, because most people were taught that the law was only concerned with the lawless, and that was mostly true. That situation no longer obtains.

The last five decades have seen an accelerating shift in social (say 'societal', if you must) norms so that the law is now so effectively neutered by hastily enacted, and woefully ill-conceived, legislation that it is now incapable of protecting (though, paradoxically, it is unable to admit that it will no longer protect) the law-abiding and maintains itself, like some bullying yet cowardly beadle, by attempting to terrorise those who were unaware that they were anything but law-abiding. Now the law seems obsessively preoccupied with regulating not just every action, but every utterance and every thought of every person. If we are not petty bureaucrats we are now petty criminals and, whether or no, we are all suspects in Laura Nodder's great game. Should we once fail to obtain, in triplicate (and after the appropriate training) the relevant official sanction we will rue the day.

For decades people have muttered angrily about the manifest unfairness of a legal system that fines people one thousand pounds for watching television without a licence, or failing to return a completed electoral roll registration form within the specified time, or failing to notify the DVLA of one's change of address, yet awards convicted foreign rapists fifty five thousand pounds because an interpreter was not present when his rights were read to him or sends hardened juvenile psychopaths on adventure holidays or awards a typist almost half a million pounds for a sore thumb.

The English love liberty, privacy and freedom from interference but such things are anathema to the Br*tish political class, obsessed with regulation and centralised control, and fearful of individual initiative. We still maintain a sense of fair-play, despite the many unfairnesses with which we are served, and despise dishonesty. We regard even petty criminals with contempt yet crime bothers the political class only in as much as it might affect the (almost pointless) ballot: It isn't the relative handful of predatory scum that threatens the established order, it is the millions of essentially decent, law abiding, tax paying citizens who are able to function without the permission of some overpaid and under-worked official and whose dissent could derail whatever 'great project' is in hand.

One of the dangers of living in a closed, self-regarding community is that, because alternative views are not presented, one develops a restricted view of the world. Politics is one such closed, self-regarding community. Those who comprise the political class, those who have set themselves in authority over us, and their functionaries and flunkies, have lost sight of their ostensible purpose. Politicians evidently believe that they can maintain themselves simply by intravenously feeding us an unrelieved diet of the thin intellectual gruel that is the woolly thinking, smudgy graphics, ideology 'lite', vaguely centre-left, 'promise anything and everything to anyone and everyone as long as it gets us elected but don't cut taxes and don't stop legislating' approach to what has become nothing more inspiring than national management. Why otherwise would they persist in asserting that they are concerned only with building a Br*tain in which every 'stakeholder' is 'engaged' with the centrally determined ideas of the moment; with vacuous utterances about 'rebuilding shattered communities'; about individuals taking responsibility for the communities in which they live; about enabling all to make their contribution to society, whether they wish to or not. We are not fooled by the arrogant clowns who scramble over each other to feed on the dung heap that is politics in McBraun's Br*tain of The Nations and Regions; who have clearly forgotten that actions speak louder than words and clearly do not realise that their actions prove their words to be mere empty rhetoric.

The English have not enjoyed a revolution against the tyranny of an oppressive, bloated and self-serving establishment for some time but the necessity for another is developing fast. The spark is likely to be something mundane: a harassed citizen driven beyond breaking point by an unproductive and otherwise unemployable baboon given a badge and a fluorescent jacket and the power to annoy the law-abiding.