Fifty Commandments of New Labour

24 April 2010

With its obsessive law-making, this government has sought to micro-manage our lives, says Brendan O’Neill. Let’s hope the next administration leaves us alone

We can’t let our children get fat — well, not unless we want a letter of warning from the children’s schools, which are now weighing our kids as part of New Labour’s National Child Measurement Programme. (Racists used to try to determine if children were ‘good citizens’ by measuring their skulls and noses, now we do it by measuring their body mass index — BMI.) We can’t put sweets in our children’s lunch boxes. Such items are increasingly being confiscated as contraband under the government Obesity Strategy’s ‘healthy lunch box policy’. Even the lunch box, that special bond between a parent and child when they are parted during the day, has been invaded and colonised by New Labour. We can’t express hatred of religion. We can’t glorify or condone acts of terrorism (asked to expand on what this might mean, Lord Falconer said it basically meant ‘attacking the values of the West’).

We can’t bring ‘too much liquid’ on to aeroplanes, only 100ml containers in a re-sealable clear plastic bag measuring 20cm by 20cm. We can no longer resist being manhandled by the police: under the 2000 Terrorism Act the police can stop anyone within a ‘designated area’ and search them for material related to terrorist actions. Also under anti-terror legislation we can’t, without potentially being stopped and questioned by the police, take photos of policemen or buildings such as Buckingham Palace: last year the police forced two Austrian tourists to delete photos of famous London landmarks. We can no longer expect to have the right to silence if arrested. We can no longer expect a right to trial by jury — this year four men were convicted in the first criminal trial without a jury in England and Wales for 400 years. And thanks to New Labour’s assault on the ‘double jeopardy’ rule, we can no longer expect to be tried for a crime only once. According to one historic study of the democratic leaps forward made in British history, the doctrines of autrefois acquit (formerly acquitted) and autrefois convict (formerly convicted) were considered ‘essential elements for the protection of the liberty of the subject’, since they guarded us from being doggedly pursued by a vindictive state determined to find us guilty of a crime. Now we can be tried for the same crime again and again.