The Bishop of Durham is hardly a man of the right. So it is interesting to note that even he has had enough of Labour’s bureaucratic authoritarianism (although he is not bold enough to use those words):
The last Government, and this isn’t a party political point it’s just a fact, produced more legislation from the Home Office in 13 years than the Home Office has produced in the previous 100 years and most of it is microscopic, micro-managing rules and regulations.
This applies to businesses, to churches, hospitals all over the place, you can’t move. We are drowning in legislation. Rules and regulations are not the way to create a good, wise, human society but our last Government tried to do that.
When it comes to child protection, we all have to fill in these forms again and again. I’ve done several of them – I’ve got one for the diocese but then there was a youth project in the diocese that was organised independently so I had to have another CRB check.
We have people come to my office all the time, frankly wasting their time and my staff’s time in order that there be a paper trail for every single person just in case something happens and somebody has to sue somebody.
Until all filing cabinets in the country get so full that they are over-flowing it looks like we are going to go on just doing this, and that is not the way to be responsible. That’s the way actually to avoid it, it’s a pseudo-responsibility and we need to learn character instead.
Durham’s statement begs the question of where was he when Labour was in power? But better late then never.
And he is right on target. I have frequently tagged Labour misgovernance as Gulag UK. But it is not the gulag of political opponents and other non-persons rotting in prison or of being sent to Siberia or Scotland, not yet at least. It is a gulag of intrusive, stifling, and often absurd bureaucracy nannying just about every area of life. Nu Labour reminds this blogger of the Vogons.
Their mindless by-the-book bureaucracy destroyed the Earth in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by the way.
Not that I have any confidence that the new coalition government will roll back Labour’s Vogonism to any notable degree. I don’t.
Do I have to fill out a form for saying that?
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