THE WAY WE LIVE NOW - Samuel Beilin

C S Lewis wrote: “ Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may bethe most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than omnipotent moralbusybody ’s.”

Whilst we all bemoan the era of Margaret Thatcher, the robber baroness of the 20th century,life today is spent dealing with the unavoidable garbage emanating from law and policy so politically correct and banal that it defies belief and which will ultimately bring the Country to its knees. Common sense has lost the will to live.

We are almost there. Businesses are bogged down with form filling for the Pay As You Earn,National Insurance, Value Added Tax and Corporation Tax. Massive amounts of additional time are spent sending returns to the Valuation Office, the Statistics Office and this year will see the introduction of Home Information Packs and Energy Performance Certificatesfor every property bought and sold. Failure to deal properly with this bureaucracy can lead to hefty fines and a criminal conviction. Extraordinary as it may seem imprisonment is deemed an acceptable punishment for those consistently unable to find the time and money to put pen to paper.

In the thousands of new pieces of legislation being churned out by our Government, bolstered by the recruitment of over eight hundred thousand new civil servants since 1997, imprisonment seems to be the penalty of choice for failure to comply. This Country has the largest prison population in Europe, people find themselves incarcerated for using their phones in the wrong places, swearing at traffic wardens and playing their music too loudly at night. Our prisons are bursting at the seams, Governors complain of a systemic failure to punish or rehabilitate and house invaders and muggers are having to be released early to make way for ASBO breakers and smokers. In the midst of this carnage a cell was found for a decorated war pensioner who had failed to pay just over a thousand pounds in Council Tax.

What was the mindset of the magistrates bench which imposed this sentence. Was it to make an example of the old obstinate warrior to ensure that the rest of the Country’s blue rinse brigade kept the pennies rolling in, was it comply with sentencing guidelines from the Ministry of Justice or was it perhaps that they just thought that some burglar needed a bit of a break with early release?

The Magisterial system was meant to bring alternative lay thinking to an otherwise unrepresentative and cosseted judiciary. By closing the cell door on a man nearing his eighties who has served us in a time of war they show that they are unwilling or unable to break away from the nonsensical hamster wheel of governance we are all riding and ultimately it is the right to justice that continues its long hard fall. Justice is being eroded, Legal Aid has been cut to a point where Queens Counsel will not take on major case work, solicitors are being driven out of work and peoples right to a free and fair defence has all but gone yet nobody seems to care.

We are experiencing a gross invasion into not only Iraq but also our private lives. Your phones can now be tapped, faxes traced and e:mails taped, you can be tried without a jury, your assets can be confiscated without a conviction and DNA taken and retained without even an arrest. Your cars can be taxed, clamped and confiscated at a whim, your dustbins micro-chipped and your every move followed by a CCTV network bigger then every other country in Europe combined. Nobody seems to care.

To fund all of this taxes continue to rise and fortunes, once bolstered by house prices, have begun to fall. Where does all the money go, the billions raised from the sale of the mobile phone networks, the billions raised from the windfall taxation of the utilities and life companies, the taxes collected all day and every day? It hasn’t gone into the NHS, it hasn’t gone on the roads, trains or airports, it hasn’t gone to secure our borders, it doesn’t go to look after the mentally ill who now seem to roam our streets at will and it doesn’t go to our pensioners, cold, hungry and on the bread line they probably thought had disappeared long after the war.

It has gone into funding a nanny state, reactive, reactionary and pregnant with waste a state obsessed with league tables, drinking, smoking, gambling and dope, a state obsessed with equal rights and equality a place that we all know does not and cannot ever exist. We are now part of Europe, make no mistake about it our rights have been signed away forever and we are now controlled by Brussels. No referendum was called, in a rare public statement of the utter contempt in which the Government hold us they decided to renege on all the promises they had made and give it all away. Nobody seems to care.

The white, working male between thirty and sixty has become this country’s minority group. We pay for the policy that is prurient, illogical and irrational and wrongly justified by our Government on the basis that it is what the majority want. They might have a majority but they don’t have a mandate and through their farcical attempt at absolute control they have not only destroyed the fabric of our society but divided the United Kingdom into three specific and disparate groups.

There are those paid for by the state, the asylum seekers, unemployed, unwell and plain bone idle who collect housing benefit, job seekers allowance and any other free handout that is on offer. There are those who work for the state, the policemen, doctors, taxmen, bailiffs, soldiers, sailors and nurses, who make their living administering and managing our very own hell. Then there is us, the businessmen and entrepreneurs. By making money we keep the whole bloody lot going under the threat of fines, penalties and winding-up, watching as our profits our poured into a bottomless state money pot, millions on the Dome, billions on Northern Rock perhaps a trillion on the Olympics, which still cannot seemingly afford to fund the protection of our homes, security of our children and care for our ill and elderly. We should have two votes at the election, a fast track queue at casualty and a state paid funeral after we have worked ourselves into an early grave.

In Italy the Government seems to fall almost every day, in France people take to the streets to aggressively voice their concerns, in Africa, home of the longest suffering of people, the tribal leaders enforce local change.

If the omnipotent busybodies are not to have their way then it is time to care and do something to make a difference now. Force through electoral change or take to the streets but go ahead and bring about change. Otherwise you will simply have to say that this is the way we live now and that is really just not good enough.