Here we are at the two hundredth anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his seminal work ‘On The Origin of Species‘ and if, in the darkness of night, there are scrabbling and shuffling noises to be heard echoing around Westminster Abbey then that will be him, turning in his grave, struggling to get out so he can shout out something politically incorrect.

I recall Darwin did not much like the term ’survival of the fittest’ which is – let’s face it – a bit of a ‘News of the World‘ type spin on his preferred term ‘natural selection’ but if he did manage to claw his way out of his grave, clambering over Isaac Newton on his way out, then it might well be his term of choice.

What he should notice, after a little bit of research and good old fashioned observation, is that evolution – in terms of the homo sapien anyway – has quite possibly started to go backwards.

Call it what you like, evolution has rolled along nicely and undisturbed for many millions of years doing it’s thing. A little change here, a small improvement there. Wings for that one. Opposable thumbs for this one. Binocular vision over here. Improved sense of smell for the one with the long nose. And it will continue to roll along as well. We can’t actually stop it and nor should we. But we can make the huge mistake of messing with it. And when people discover they can do something there is always some bozo who goes ahead and does it.

And one of the bozos in this case is the one who came up with the idea of the Health and Safety Executive – a body whose sole aims are to remove all of the fun and the risk out of life. Natural Selection doesn’t mean people born with disease or disability are left to die before they can reproduce although let’s be totally honest here and recognise that this was once the case and still is outside of us humans. Natural Selection means that the idiot who doesn’t use a ladder properly, falls off and dies is removed from the gene pool to the betterment of us all. These days he probably can’t even buy the ladder in the first place without a three week training course and an NVQ in ladder usage. And should he borrow a ladder from someone else the H&S men will slap a fine on him and send him for corrective therapy.

Evolution basically works by promoting the good bits, the clever bits, the enhanced bits and letting the bad bits and the useless bits fall by the wayside. And the ones who have got those good bits get to pass them on like a family heirloom. And those with the bad bits fall off ladders. But other bozos, including those who came up with the life-stifling theory of Political Correctness, have decreed that we all have to be equal. Or all the same. As I have said many times before, this means we all have to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. So those with good bits that are really worthy of evolutions attention have to have those good bits repressed. It’s happening all around us. They get forced to go to Comprehensive Schools. They get turned down for jobs because one of the candidates was clearly more stupid than they were or comes from an ethnic minority and can’t speak the language buy hey – positive discrimination is on their side.

We are in the process of screwing evolution up big time. People survive disease and disability that would have once – and not so long ago – taken them out of the gene pool. Being clever, intelligent and inventive is almost frowned upon. Being competitive is OK as long as you restrict it to buying lottery tickets. And taking risks or having fun is outlawed.

And before we realise it, we’ll all be growing more body hair and starting to suffer from a strong urge to climb trees.

I have touched on this subject before but events have now moved on a little and the battle lines are drawn. But first, a little personal history.

When I was a kid I used to play outdoors – most often in the forest that we lived beside. In warm weather and when school was out, my friends and I would disappear early in the morning and as long as I touched base at home from time to time it was likely to be sunset before I returned. We had a ‘play’ area that stretched for many miles and on those hot, lazy days, we would get cuts and bruises, eat the blackberries growing in the hedgerows and get dirty and covered in the detritus of the forest floor. The cuts miraculously healed themselves, the blackberries didn’t poison us and the dirt? Well, what was wrong with a bit of dirt. It washed off. Childhood was an experience, slowly pushing the boundaries of our independence and the odd medical emergency was a necessary part of learning to cope. We learned which adults to avoid, which ones we could rely on for help if needed and mourned a wasted day if the weather forced us inside.

As a young teenager I still remember buying my first pair of headphones. I bought them in a local hi-fi shop where the guy behind the counter not only had good product knowledge but was quite happy to impart it because he wanted you to go away happy with your purchase. And he wanted you to come back some day and buy something else. So I got advice. But more importantly I got to handle the goods and try them out for comfort and sound quality. That’s right, they went on my head and I put the earpieces over my ears. My actual ears. I guess many people before me had tried on some of those phones and guess what… I didn’t catch any diseases. My ears didn’t fall off two weeks later and the world as I knew it did not come to an end. This was a truly serious and risky business – my life was at stake. But I survived and, what’s more, ended up with a pair of headphones that were just what I wanted, fit perfectly and eventually gave me years of service.

Wind forward to today and I am in need of a new pair of headphones. You already know what this is about. There they are on a rack in John Lewis, all bubble packed in that stiff plastic you need to take an axe to and no – you can not try them on before you buy. You can not test for comfort, fit and, above all, you can not test the sound quality. So says the evil Health and Safety Executive. So – I naturally ask – what happens if I get them home, manage to prise them out of the packaging and when I get back from the local Accident and Emergency department find they don’t fit? Well – said the guy at John Lewis – you get your money back less 10%. I kid you not – that was what I was told. I bought them – those ones in the picture – whilst making a verbal declaration at the till that I expected a full refund if I had to return them. You know the rest. Got them home – there was much swearing and searching for industrial strength tools to penetrate the packaging which, in the end I managed to do with no blood being spilled and do they fit? Of course they don’t. For a £69 pair of phones from a respected manufacturer like Denon they are bloody useless. If I put them on and someone asks me a question to which I nod my head – they fall right off. When my wife tried them on, the ear cups dangled somewhere around her lobes missing the actual ear altogether. Did it say on the box that they were for people with really big ears and long heads? Did the guy in Lewis’s inform me they were no good to me because my head just wasn’t big enough? How many petty laws might he have broken of he had done?

So – as I said at the top – the battle lines are drawn and these have got to go back. Now forgive me for this but I am about to say something hypocritical. I have ranted enough in the past about petty regulations that strangle our every moment and dictate our every move but sometimes you just have to bite your tongue. What I want to know is who wins between the appalling Health and Safety and the office of Fair Trading who dictate that what I buy has to be fit for the purpose?

I guess I am about to find out.

The big news story over the last couple of weeks or so has, of course, revolved around not so honourable members of parliament caught with their hands in the public till and the general and predictable melt-down of the Brown government. Many thousands of words have been written on this subject by professionals and amateurs alike so nobody really needs my contribution. But I am going to give it anyway and it was prompted by visiting the BBC news website this morning only to find that for a change politics was not the main story. Swine flu has made a comeback as the lead.

I found the whole media frenzy over MP’s expenses to be both indicative of what is rotten in UK politics but at the same time found the public outrage to be somewhat hypocritical. Fiddling expense claims and trying to reduce income tax liability have long been considered an English sport from the hiring of advisers and accountants by the wealthy to the loading of overtime by the rank and file. Who can honestly say that at no time in their working life have they claimed a dubious expense, put in an overtime claim for work they did not do or even stolen a pencil from the stationery cupboard? A matter of degree perhaps but it is the same form of corruption. The difference, of course, is being found out so we can all sit sanctimoniously back and point an accusing finger while conveniently forgetting our own small victories against our employer or the tax man.

What was of real interest while these revelations were being published, was the frenzied reaction of various politicians. For a while there, many of them exposed our democracy for the sham it really is. Suddenly we were being very publicly told what is fundamentally wrong with our system of politics – an inherently corrupt system that so favours the government of the day that any election victor will automatically choose to maintain the status quo. In particular there were sudden placatory calls for alternative voting systems; for an ending of the ‘whip’; for back-benchers to have more say in law and policy making and for fixed term parliaments.

All of these proposals, calls for which have recently come from all shades of the political spectrum, would greatly enhance true democracy in the UK. A voting system that allows a government to be formed without a majority of nationwide votes is by it’s nature suspect. The whipping system that keeps MP’s in line with party policy has nothing whatsoever to do with representation of their electorate or with the convictions that drove them into politics in the first place. Fixed term parliaments would remove the advantage a sitting Prime Minister has to call an election based on current public opinion. And giving the majority of those who call themselves the nations representatives the actual tools they need to represent us could be the one, single act that could change our form of governance for ever and for the better. I suspect that the majority of our population do not fully understand the difference between ‘government’ and ‘parliament’ which is the way any incumbent government like it – but over the last couple of weeks, if they were listening properly, they should have found out.

There is, I believe, very little likelihood of real change. The route from being an earnest and honourable candidate, through to a back-bencher drone making up the voting numbers, on to a junior minister, a cabinet member and finally Prime Minister is littered with compromise and an acceptance that without those very undemocratic processes at play life for a government would not be so easy.

And yesterday signalled quite clearly that we were back to business as usual. Gordon Brown announced a placebo enquiry into our voting and electoral system while another Labour party spokesman made it clear that any referendum on the subject would not be binding. But it was left up to David Cameron to hammer the nail into the coffin of the short-lived hopes for proper reform when he responded to Brown’s statement with the infantile and fallacious comment that the Prime Minister was trying to rig the system to ensure a Labour party victory at the next General Election. In that one statement, Cameron reduced what is an imperative for true reform to the usual playground behaviour of wanting to be the first on the swings. He is either stupid or – more likely – can already smell the scent of power floating on the winds. So why rock the boat?

I missed this when it was reported but the anger is not diminished because of that. Austrian tourists Klaus Matzka and his teenage son Loris, on a recent visit to London, did what all tourists do – they took photographs. Photographs of buildings, photographs of London Buses and one – believe it or not – of Vauxhall underground station. They apparently liked the architecture. They also snapped a couple of London bobbies but it was to be their undoing when the policemen then forced them to delete all the photos from their camera. The police also took details on the pair including their passport numbers.

Under Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, photographing a policeman within the city can land you a fine or a 10-year prison sentence. Did you know that? Which brings us to the crux of the problem. The attacks on our London bus and tube network in July 2007 were an outrage that we shall not easily forget and dealing with the aftermath of such an attack is a tricky business.

At one end of the scale is the stance that, as a nation, we don’t give in to terrorism. Life goes on as usual with the threat of another attack always just around the corner. We hunt down the perpetrators, we improve our intelligence gathering so as to thwart other attacks wherever possible but we stand tall and proud and state clearly that this is our way of life and a small band of people intent on destroying that will change nothing.

At the other end of the scale we pass all kinds of draconian laws, start to limit peoples freedoms, ban people from gathering in large groups in ’sensitive’ places and grant the police powers that will induce wet-dreams to all those that love the uniform and authority. And this is exactly what our political masters have done.

The problem, of course, is that the government still recites the mantra that we do not give in to terrorism. But the actions that have been taken do exactly that. Our way of life and our freedoms, so carefully won over centuries of our history as a nation, are being stripped away piece by piece and this is not only ‘giving in to terrorists’ – it is rewarding them with exactly what they want.

The United Kingdom has the extremely dubious honour of having more public CCTV cameras than any other in the world (for its population size).

A 2007 report by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office, highlighted the need for the public to be made more aware of the “creeping encroachment” into their civil liberties created by the growing use of surveillance apparatus. A year prior to the report Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, warned that Britain was “sleepwalking into a surveillance society”.

It also appears that we are equally sleepwalking into the beginnings of a Police State. This weeks news that the Home Office intends to go ahead with demanding that Internet service and cell phone service providers record and keep data on every phone call we make, every website we visit, every email we send and every contact made through the web or instant messaging systems, is proof of the decline of our basic freedoms and the encroachment into every part of our lives of ‘authority’. Wikipedia defines a Police State as one:

in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic and political life of the population. A police state typically exhibits elements of totalitarianism and social control, and there is usually little or no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive.

The inhabitants of a police state experience restrictions on their mobility, and on their freedom to express or communicate political or other views, which are subject to police monitoring or enforcement. Political control may be exerted by means of a secret police force which operates outside the boundaries normally imposed by a constitutional state.

Ask a native of Britain if they live in a Police State and they will almost certainly laugh at the very notion. Examine the evidence of state behaviour – surveillance, monitoring of communications, detention without charge, restrictions of movement, restrictions on gathering in groups and the right to publicly protest and it becomes a little clearer that we are teetering on the edge of a new era that contradicts everything this country has stood for up until now.

Ask Klaus Matzka and his son Loris and they will almost certainly answer that this new era has already arrived.

We learned last week that our beloved leaders want to give us a say on the quality of the services we receive. This was likened to EBay’s feedback points system where we could rate our local doctor, school, council, police etc. This is, of course, just another sop to make it look like we can get involved in the decision making process as well as a device to create a whole new government department to monitor, compile results and publish yet more pointless ‘reports’.
To be worthwhile, a proposal like this has to be given teeth. If we knew that a specific target rating would trigger change of some sort then we might go for it. But we know better of course. We wont be able to remove a policeman from the local force or a judge from the bench or the local traffic and road planner from his cushy job in the town hall. And, more importantly, there was no mention of being able to rate our local MP, our government or our Minister’s – which just might grab peoples attention.

England’s Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson – who I will not get the chance to ‘rate’ – has proposed a minimum price per unit of alcohol to try and curb binge drinking by the lads and ladettes who plague our night-time streets fuelled to their empty brains on cheap supermarket booze. The idiot said that this would ‘not effect moderate drinkers’. Well – I am a moderate drinker so how do I avoid the price hike? Do I get a special ‘Moderate Drinkers Club’ card to flash in the off-license? Do I swear an oath at the Waitrose checkout every time I replenish my stock of Glenfiddich? Or do I just stump up the extra cash and swear at Donaldson for this perpetual government policy of punishment of the many for the crimes of the few?

Should I not be suitably angered to learn that the Royal Bank of Scotland – having accepted billions of pounds in bale-out funds from the UK taxpayer – has promised to pump some of it back in mortgage money – but only in Scotland? I will be interested to see what Brown and his Darling get up to when they are finally booted out of the political arena.

As a life long fan of The Pink Floyd who will never now, of course, perform again, I looked up details on ‘Think Floyd’, supposedly one of the better tribute bands who are performing in a theatre near me in April. During the course of this exercise, I found a list of Pink Floyd tribute bands from around the world. There seems to be a bit of a glut. If asked, I would have guessed that maybe there were a couple in the UK but that would have severely underestimated those seeking their pleasure pretending to be someone else. Current number of such bands in the UK? 88. Worrying isn’t it?