It is very British to pass a law making it illegal to create a nuclear explosion
Idread to think why a Liberal Democrat would want to impersonate a traffic warden. It wouldn’t just be to get free parking. Not with them. It would have to be a sex thing. Some kind of NCPthemed bondage dungeon; an underground den kitted out to look like an underground car park. ‘You’ve been a very naughty motorist.’ Yes, traffic mistress. ‘You’ve been feeding your meter, haven’t you?’ Yes, traffic mistress. ‘So what is to be your punishment? The double-yellow, or a clamp on your red route?’ Both, traffic mistress...
Gaaaargh. Gaaargh and aaaaargh. But hold. Because you probably don’t actually know what I’m talking about, do you? At least, not if you live in Britain. Elsewhere in the world, you might. You see, I’m talking about Chris Huhne. He made a speech last week, and his words made headlines from Paris to Beijing. Auckland, Pretoria and Tokyo, too. Pretty much everywhere, in fact, except for Britain. We didn’t give a hoot. I’ve been wondering why.
It could just be that our papers don’t much go in for quirky news. I’ve only seen Mr Huhne’s global coverage online, obviously, but my hunch would be that most of it appeared in backpage sidebar columns, alongside stories entitled ‘My Sister Married My Toothbrush’ and ‘Foal Drives Rally Car’ and suchlike. For Mr Huhne was trotting out one of his favourite bugbears, and that bugbear is weird laws. Labour has created 3,600 new laws since 1997. Not all of them are weird, but Mr Huhne feels that many are.
He is particularly upset that the law specifically prohibits creating a nuclear explosion, as he feels that anybody doing so could probably be prosecuted for other offences, such as murder. ‘Other of the new offences,’ he went on, ‘include: wilfully pretending to be a barrister; disturbing a pack of eggs when instructed not to by an authorised officer; obstructing workers carrying out repairs to the Docklands Light Railway; offering for sale a game bird killed on a Sunday or Christmas Day.’ Then he gave way to Jack Straw, threatening darkly that his list could have continued.
I’m sure it could have, and if you want to see just how, I’d suggest you look up an article in the Independent from September, when he first started harping on about this sort of thing. That time, he mentioned the traffic wardens. This time, he concentrated on the barristers. I suspect that only in the darkest and most fetid reaches of the Liberal Democrats will anybody be entirely certain why. Maybe it’s something to do with wigs.
Huhne’s message, anyway, was that our government has legislative diarrhoea, and (without wishing to let this metaphor get so Liberal Democrat-themed that you actually feel sick) that this makes the job of law enforcement altogether more difficult and unpleasant. It’s a fair point, albeit not a new one, and doubtless the upshot of having a government stuffed with lawyers, which continues to approach the world in lawyerly ways. Indeed, one could argue that one of the many reasons why the wheels of government appear to have fallen off recently is that suddenly most of the Cabinet aren’t really lawyers, but are merely wilfully impersonating lawyers. Not that I’d be prepared to argue this in a court of law, of course. That would be illegal.
My worry is, I don’t actually think it is unreasonable to prohibit people from pretending to be barristers. Or traffic wardens. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to outlaw causing a nuclear explosion either, or to ban people from preventing other people from repairing the DLR, or to ban them from selling birds shot on days when birds should have been left alone. That ‘pack of eggs’ law is a bit weird, granted, but I suspect this is only because I don’t understand it. In fact, I don’t think any of Mr Huhne’s weird laws are that weird at all. And, such is the furore that they have repeatedly failed to cause, my hunch would be that most other Brits don’t, either.
And yet, in China and France and South Africa, they do. There, they think our laws are so weird that they report them in col umns specifically designed for reporting weird things. I appreciate that foreign laws can seem peculiar just because they are foreign (in Alabama, says Google, it’s illegal to wrestle a bear) but there is nothing particularly British about trains or eggs or nuclear bombs. So my only conclusion is that we must just expect a little more official intervention in our lives than the South Africans or the French or even the Chinese expect in theirs. And that’s not a thought I like at all. Gaaargh. Gaaargh and aaargh.
Is it time to start getting annoyed, do you think, with the Labour party’s hereditary principle? There’s plenty to find irritating about Speaker Martin, especially now he has started speaking only in that special, high voice he uses when he knows he is in the wrong, but what has irritated me most of all was that report in the Telegraph about a supposed plan for persuading him to stand down. ‘Senior Labour figures,’ it said, ‘are now discussing plans to persuade Michael Martin to step down as Speaker by offering his Glasgow North West seat to his son.’ To his credit, Paul Martin (an MSP) has already ridiculed the notion. Still, in the wider Labour context, it wouldn’t exactly be unprecedented. They shoved Tamsin Dunwoody into the fray in Crewe and Nantwich, didn’t they? Because on the Left, you see, you are allowed to brazenly cash in on familial political heritage without even being accused of nepotism. It’s probably something you put on your CV. Mandelson and the Milibands virtually boast about being descended from left-wing grandees, and the opportunities it afforded. Hilary Benn is afforded an extra dose of gravitas, and his niece Emily (the UK’s youngest ever parliamentary candidate, at 19) didn’t exactly come from nowhere, did she?
Should this sort of thing happen on the Right, the Labour machine would be apoplectic. Hence, there is a wariness. It took Nick Hurd so long to land a candidacy that the Telegraph dubbed him the ‘perennial Tory bridesmaid’. A Thatcher or a Major or a Heseltine would face the same sort of problems, as I suspect, will the next generation of Churchills or Soames. Indeed, anybody with a recognisably Tory name and an interest in politics should probably think about changing it. Or try journalism.
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