Blair Bans Hopscotch: The Onward March Of New Labour Orwellianism

Recently in West Sussex, a five-year-old child was formally reprimanded by police officers for committing vandalism. The incident of vandalism in question involved the child making – get this – hopscotch markings on the pavement. Yes, that’s right; centuries after its creation, hopscotch is now considered an anti-social activity to be stamped out (no pun intended) by the authorities for being a slippery slope towards a life of crime. You couldn’t make this up if you tried; this isn’t political correctness, its just laziness with a vindictive killjoy streak by the police brought about by an interfering and malevolent nanny state that has long since lost touch with common sense and reality.

If officials in Nazi Germany worked towards the aims and wishes of the Fuhrer as the historian Professor Ian Kershaw noted, then the minions of New Labour can be said to be ‘working towards the front-page newspaper headlines’. Tony Blair and his stooges are so obsessed with the agenda of the media, that they have always devised measures and legislation off the cuff to neutralise any negative opinion towards themselves. The problem with this style of governance is that it is usually ill thought through and repressive in nature (especially when the government in question is as obsessed with control and micromanagement as New Labour) that overlaps and contradicts itself and existing legislation, while giving little-to-no consideration of the unintentional consequences.

Because New Labour is so obsessed with their media image over law and order, they have introduced a raft of measures and performances targets for the police to meet. New Labour has also created so much paperwork for police officers to fill in to cover themselves against the 1998 Human Rights Act, that the police are forced to take liberties and short cuts based on technicalities to meet these targets. Obviously, tackling drug dealers, bank robbers, paedophiles and murderers is too much hard work and too time-consuming to pursue compared to harassing law-abiding innocents such the earlier-mentioned five-year-old child in order for the police to meet its government targets.

The five-year-old child should consider itself fortunate to escape with only a reprimand. Thanks to legislation brought in by Tony Blair and his Home Secretaries, the child can be detained and forced to provide a DNA sample to the police, which is then to be stored on the force’s national database for the rest of that child’s life, regardless of whether they are cleared or convicted of any criminal offence. That, combined with insidious system of ASBOs that gives gossip the same legal credibility as that of evidence and eyewitness testimony, the ten years of government legislation that has curtailed our civil liberties and New Labour’s incessant meddling in our private lives are the real and evil legacy of Tony Blair’s decade-long reign of terror, not Iraq!