ninme

It keeps popping up.

At last, all the threats to our liberty have been twigged, By Stephen Robinson

But what makes Blair Mark 1 seem unrecognisable against the version we see these days is in his talking about the simple common law notion of liberty.

I cringe when I hear a government minister on the Today programme on Radio 4 talk about our “rights” as parents, or hospital patients, or endowment policy holders, but I honestly cannot remember the last time I heard a member of the Cabinet talk of liberty or freedom, except conceivably in the context of Iraq.

And it sounds like the Euro Constitution is full of protecting the rights of endowment policy holders, but not so much about simple liberties.

In the 1970s, the Labour Party assumed the government should run airlines, and telephone companies, and steel works and car factories.

The Thatcherite reforms of the 1980s made that view untenable, but the desire to control never left them. Mr Blunkett and Mr Clarke et al dropped their loony Left demands for command and control of the economy, and opted instead to run our lives. So they dream of issuing us with plastic ID cards costing £85 containing our iris imprints, and say they have to keep our fellow countrymen locked up in their homes without charge or trial, on their say so.

Goodness, can you imagine Barbara Boxer controlling our iris imprints? Or Hillary, for that matter.