I’VE GONE TO Ethiopia. As you read this I am following camels on their annual journey down from the Highlands of Abyssinia into the Danakil Depression where the animals are led in trains to be loaded with slabs of rock-salt chiselled from the edge of the lake in the desert. Temperatures exceed 110F. Flies will torment me. Sulphur dioxide from acid-yellow vents beside the lake will irritate lungs and throat. I shall have no more than a jug of water to wash in every day . And I shall be among the ferocious Afar, the native tribe who were described by the explorer Nesbitt as wearing necklaces of the desiccated scrotums of all the men they had killed.
This I have freely chosen. It will all — the flies, the heat, the dust and even the necklaces — be paradise when compared with the alternative: to stay beneath the grim skies of Britain awaiting the next fatuous initiative from Downing Street. No sulphurous vent in the Abyssinian desert ever spouted worse.
I am setting out for Gatwick with £1,000 cash in my pocket and, ringing in my ears, the latest asinine proposal from the Government. Doctors (it is suggested) will be rewarded with special cash bonuses if they refuse to sign their patients on to incapacity benefit.
And, no, I pen this column not to resist the idea. There is no need for me to resist the idea. It is obvious nonsense. It will be dead before the first daffodils of the coming spring poke through the soil. One needs no more than the prosecuting intellect of a day-old chick to see why; and the chorus of voices, from the BMA downwards, will confirm it. The relationship between doctor and patient . . .
No — enough. I said the objections were obvious and they are. And that — not a series of arguments against one proposal or another — is my point. Why does this Prime Minister keep missing the obvious?
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How can it be that the stream of fatuous proposals that began not long after he reached Downing Street and shows no sign of abating as his departure approaches, ever reach the launching pad? We know they must crash — anyone can see they must crash — so how do they keep getting past the stage of being doodles on Tony Blair’s notepad?
Sometimes it seems to be government by doodle. You have to hand it to him. He has done an immense amount to induce in ordinary citizens a new confidence in our own powers of analysis. Half the people on your average bus now suspect that they aren’t nearly as daft as the Prime Minister and his entire Cabinet. Which of us has not lain in bed listening to the morning radio and been able, at 30 seconds’ notice and from a horizontal position, to shoot down in flames whatever kite is being flown by ministers that day? Ideas that would not survive the second thoughts of four blokes in a pub are reaching their second reading in the House of Commons. Whatever hurdles proposals have to clear these days, on their way from the Downing Street sofa to Royal Assent, must be less challenging that the critical appraisal they would face in the average high-street hairdressing salon.
Here in no particular order is a selection of horrors of which a handful — unbelievably — have made it on to the statute book (and sunk into oblivion), a handful are bogged down in the House of Lords, and the rest have simply disappeared into an embarrassed silence. The point about all these is not that nobody should even have dreamt them up in the bath. Many brilliant ideas start in the bath, but so do many idiotic ones. The point is that none should have survived beyond the final gurgle from the plughole.
Remember the yobs/cash machines proposal? The Prime Minister wanted yobs marched to cash machines with their cash cards so they could pay an on the spot fine. Enough said — except that this got all the way to a prime ministerial press conference without Mr Blair seeming to see the difficulties. It was as if he were some kind of mad medieval monarch to whose nutty ideas courtiers would gently respond with a “What a good idea, sire!” or an “It shall be done at once, my liege”. Are there no Sir Humphreys left in Whitehall to respond: “Brave idea, Prime Minister. May we mull it over for a while?” So were lessons learnt from the cash machines debacle? Anything but. Look at the latest lunacy: the plan for anyone with as much as £1,000 in his pocket to be liable for arrest on suspicion. That’s me then, hauled off the train to the airport.
Then there are the “Baby ASBOs”. These ludicrous creatures have already been savaged by another of the Government’s silly ideas: the Children’s Commissioner. It seems new Labour’s follies are actually beginning to attack each other. Perhaps the Children’s Commissioner will attack proposals for a National Bedtime and a National Story Time. And what does the Pensioners Tsar (did that one ever happen?) think about the Children’s Commissioner? It will be fun to see them wrestling in mud.
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Which reminds me: what happened to the local curfews? Children were to be subject to these wherever local authorities imposed them. Have any done so?
Nor do we know the views of the Children’s Commissioner on an unhinged proposal emanating not from No 10 but from No 11 Downing Street — “Child Trust Funds”. Money will be confiscated from parents and others and put into compulsory savings accounts that their children can blow on a motor bike on their 18th birthday. How did Gordon Brown get away with this?
Or take his proposal that people could sell themselves their second homes, call it a pension plan and pocket the tax rebate. It took a whole summer to kill this. It should have taken ten minutes.
What do Whitehall mandarins do these days? Did none predict the fate of the proposal that “glorifying terrorism” should become a crime? When I heard Charles Clarke announce that there would be an approved list of historical terrorists whom we were allowed to glorify, I thought I was dreaming. The measure is currently sinking in the House of Lords.
Mr Blair’s “Sharia” proposal was at least killed faster. How a trained lawyer like he ever imagined that English criminal jurisprudence would be reconciled to inviting victims of crime to advise on the appropriate punishment is a mystery. Less hilarious was the gross impertinence of a plan to let “on the run” terrorist suspects come home without fear of having to come to court. Cases would be heard in which the survivors of murder victims would have to testify while their alleged murderers would not. I keep trying to imagine the scene in which Peter Hain explained this idea to all his clever Cabinet colleagues, and nobody put up any objection — but imagination fails me.
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And did nobody pipe up when Mr Clarke’s suggestion that problem householders should simply be evicted was added to the Prime Minister’s Respect Agenda? Did no colleague venture to inquire where these families were to be sent after they had been evicted? Concentration camps?
A time is coming, and faster than some think, when we shall marvel at how long we put up with this cascades of inanities for so long. Were our leaders out of their minds we shall ask? Was any single, rational human intelligence awake on the ship’s bridge as we sailed into the night?
I may ask the Ethiopian camels when I meet them. I shall hope to find among them powers of reason lacking in the Great Camel of Downing Street.