16 APRIL 1977, Page 3

Garden of futility

Reform and repeal—or rather reform by repeal. That would be no bad precept for any political party to follow (and they are all contemplating their electoral programmes). Although we can hardly expect Labour, the Party of intervention and public controls, to think so, the Others would be well advised to consider the attractions of such a policy. It could be productive of nothing but good. There is too much government : we want less. There are toe many laws, restrictions, prohibitions, directives : they should be slashed. Repeal the bad or unnecessary laws. Re move the futile restraints. Restore lost liberties. To say this is not to advocate an untrammelled free-for-all but a freeing of all, a measure of release. 'Set the people free' was Churchill's call—his rallying cry—in Opposition after the War. It should be taken up again. he absurd Sunday trading restrictions are a minor example of the officious nonsense in which we are so deeply enmeshed. Freedom to trade in any commodity licensing day (at whatever hour) should be axiomatic. The licensing laws are similarly tiresome and ludicrous—so 411-ich so that there is no need to state, let alone debate, the °Ile required reform. Taxation procedures should be simplified. Both in application and method of collection, VAT is particularly vexatious tious, involving as it does an army of Customs and Excise officers many of whom are employed in a comietelY negative process producing not a net gain but a net i?.,ss to the Exchequer. Statutory bodies meanwhile proterate to no evident public advantage. We are physically !tarn strung, just as we are dragged down financially, by the w ight of a swollen (and sometimes aggressive) bureaucracy.

We have become so inured to the more absurd and 'ange.rous pretensions of governments and government a gencles, however, that the recent claim to power of the Equal Opportunities Commission has failed to provoke the public indignation which it should have aroused. In brief, and with the Conservative local authority at Tameside as their first victim, the Commissioners have so interpreted the law on equal opportunities for women as to claim a right to interfere, not merely with educational provisions made under the 1944 and other relevant Acts, but with the way in which parents choose to bring up their children, and with the ambitions and hopes which they have for therm The charge against the Tameside authority is that, in the manner in which it implemented an election pledge (to do so it had to win an action before the Court of Appeal), it discriminated as between boys and girls, thus offending against the Act. To the Commission, it seems unlikely that Tameside is alone in its offence: in making projections of educational need, and predictions about future taste, those in charge of our educational system must to some extent take account of what children of different sexes, and their parents, want. This expression of parental desires, says the Commission, is illegal, because it means that girls may well be offered different courses, and different teaching methods, from boys.

The dreadful reality is that the Commission, in its interpretation of the law, is correct: the degree to which the Equal Opportunities Act, carried through Parliament by the efforts of one of the most fanatical pressure groups of modern times, interferes, or allows interference, as between parent and child was simply not realised. In other words the Equal Opportunities Act, like so much of recent legislation that can be grouped under the general title of social engineering, has unforeseen and dangerous consequences.

When there is overmuch legislation it is seldom good legislation. The proof of that has become painfully plain.