Your Body Belongs To Brown

Gordon Brown is a true socialist. He believes in a powerful State. A State so powerful, in fact, that it owns the bodies of its subjects.

At present, if you want to donate your organs after your death, you card a donor card that says so. If Brown gets his way, the State will have the right to rip up your body and extract whatever organs it likes unless you specifically say that they can't.

You might say that in practice it makes no huge difference, and in one sense you'd be right. In future, if you don't want to donate your organs you simply "opt out" (although it's unclear how you'd go about it). But underneath there's a sinister and insidious presumption; that by default the State owns you body and has first refusal on everything in it.

Quite apart from this government's woeful record on data management, and whether we can really trust them to hold and access accurately information on those who decide they want to "opt out" such that no one will ever be violated in death who wished to be kept in tact, this awful proposal reeks this socialist State wanting to exert ever greater authority over each and every one of us.

Under Gordon Brown, you're not even free when you're dead.