A friend of mine in London sent me an email. He has just gone back to work at the Treasury, after some time off sick. Sick of GB I think. This is what he said: “In just a few days the centralising Stalinist state socialism of Labour seems but a distant memory. No more ID cards, no more State control of everyone’s DNA, the surveillance society in retreat.” Just how I feel after reading Dave and Nick’s latest love-in coalition offspring, ‘our programme for government’.
You can download all 34 pages of it from the directgov website. The thing that struck me first of all was the choice of colour: a sickly pale green. It must be what you get when you mix Tory blue and Lib Dem orange. You can’t look at it for too long, which is slightly worrying as this looks like the precise colour I chose for my new kitchen cupboards in London. They have been fitted in my absence just before the election so I have not seen them yet up close and personal. I guess I must have had some sort of premonition that the new Big Society was gonna look like snot and I wanted to be in on the act.
Apart from the colour, I love the cover page, the values underpinning this government: Freedom, Fairness, Responsibility. As well as no ridiculous ID cards, there are plenty of other great proposals. For a start, making hospitals share non-confidential information with the police to enable them to target stop and search in gun and knife crime hot spots. Also reviewing alcohol taxation and pricing so that binge drinkers are targeted but responsible drinkers are not penalised. They will also stop the deportation of asylum seekers who would be sent back to countries where their sexual orientation would put them at risk of punishment or prison. All good stuff and pretty liberal, I think. Can’t understand why the Guardian readers are so bitter.
As for green issues, not sure about cancelling the third runway at Heathrow That might be a step too far. But encouraging local councils to pay people to recycle seems far more sensible to me than the current system that seems to make recycling a health hazard that must be done on pain on huge fines. Really? Stalinist is the word that comes to mind for the system, introduced under Labour, that involves numerous different bins in people’s already cluttered kitchens. Good government educates, encourages and rewards responsibility and good citizenship. It doesn’t turn half the population into a criminal or a jabbering wreck if you put the excess baked beans in the wrong recycling bin….
I think I like the Dave and Nick show so far. Just wondering if they can sort out British Airways and their ridiculous strikes and predictable lack of profits!
