Taking liberties

A couple of items, seemingly unrelated, have caught my eye in the news today. The first was the proposal to cut the alcohol limit for drivers and the second was the call for further restrictions on parents rights to discipline their children.

As I said, these two items appear, at first, to be unrelated, but they do have something in common which I'd like to mention and which, when you think about it, is becoming increasingly common in Britain.

If we look at the smacking ban for example, it is obvious to all right minded people that physical abuse of children is wrong, but there is a world of difference between administering a short sharp smack to the bottom of a young child and beating a child to pulp.

And the same applies to drinking and alcohol. Having a half pint at lunch before driving back to work is a long way from sinking 8 pints of super strength lager and then driving home from the pub while barely able to focus.

And this brings me to the thing that these two items have in common - that neither of them will have any effect on curbing the actions of those who do beat children viciously or drink excessively before driving. They do it now even though it is illegal and they will continue to do it after any change in the law. However, rather than deal with the real problem people, the liberal progressive establishment choose, instead, to widen the net to cover more people who aren't actually doing anything wrong.

This is an increasingly common phenomenon. One of the things I detest most as a driver are "speed bumps" which have sprung up all over the place. I'm not sure what the purpose of speed bumps is. I know they are supposed to stop speeding motorists, but motorists who want to speed will do so anyway - they will just do it where there are no speed bumps and, unless you want to cover every urban road, that is just as likely to be a built up zone as anywhere else.

But the real problem with speed bumps is that they punish the legal driver as much as the illegal driver. That is fundamentally wrong. An action by a government to curb illegal behaviour should be targeted at those who commit illegal acts and not at the law abiding majority who obey the speed limits, enjoy a pint of beer or glass of wine with their lunch or smack their child on the bottom because they love and care for them and don't want to see them get really badly hurt.

All of these things add up to a fundamental attack on our traditional freedoms and liberty which we have spent hundreds of years building up and fought several wars to defend. It's the reason why our government want us all to carry id cards - because a few, nominally "British" citizens want to kill other British citizens.

At the core of this assault on traditional British liberty is the modern British curse, progressive liberalism. It's progressive liberalism which has replaced local police with local knowledge and the remit to use common sense in dealing with the public with huge centralised bureaucracies largely remote from the public and constrained by rigid inflexible regulations handed down by even more remote officials.

It is progressive liberalism that has created the social worker network that refuses to help the children of real problem parents because it is too difficult or politically incorrect - so instead goes after soft targets of decent parents under a pretence of "abuse" because their kid is a bit overweight.

And it is progressive liberalism that refuses to tackle the terrorists that exist in Britain for fear of being considered discriminatory.