Banned By The State X - Naked Gnomes

This post is based on a story in The Sun, so the normal health warnings apply. I guess it might have been exaggerated, or conceivably might not be true. But it’s daft enough to be true, and in any case it gives me a chance to rant, and that’s good enough for me.

When I’m Prime Minister, I’m going to abolish Bromsgrove Council. Why ? I’ve got nothing against Bromsgrove – never been there. Are they hugely inefficient ? No idea. Do they charge exorbitant rates of Council Tax ? Not sure. Do they let their residents kills their kids, a la Haringey ? Probably not. I want to abolish Bromsgrove Council because they’ve just abolished naked garden gnomes, and in so doing they epitomise the nannying, snooping, micro-managing, voyeuristic, offence-obsessed, harmless-fun-hating Nazis who run our country these days. I’d dearly like to see the back of every one of them and Bromsgrove seems as good a place to start as any other.

If this blog had the readership to justify it, I think I’d run one of those Iain Dale-type competitions, where you’re invited to finish a sentence with some amusing – but apposite – ending.

The sentence I’d have in my competition would be “You know the State’s getting too big when….”, and my own entry would be, ”…Councils have got time to worry about naked gnomes in people’s gardens”.

Have you ever heard something as ridiculous as the State telling someone to dress a garden gnome ? Well, OK yes, you probably have heard of one or two things which are every bit as ridiculous…perhaps you even heard about some of them on this blog, including but not limited to: bans on feeding the ducks; preventing kids wearing football boots; outlawing bouncy castles; a ban on swimming in the rain and God knows what else (click on the "Banned By The State" label at the bottom to see the full series). But what better illustrates the lengths these people will go to interfere with our lives and to tell us what to do ? And what more powerfully demonstrates that the people who can now exercise such power over us use absolutely no common sense and fail completely to grasp the idea of free expression – the principle we used to call “live and let live” ?

“Live and let live”. Whatever happened to that ? Whatever happened to the idea that if someone wanted to do something which caused absolutely no harm whatsoever to anyone or anything, then they should be allowed to do it ? It died some time ago – probably during the lifetime of this government – and Bromsgrove Council have just cremated the corpse.

So, along with numerous other organisations and people, Bromsgrove Council is on the Womble Hit List. They’d better watch out.

When I see this kind of tyranny from a council I reveal the political make-up of its councillors, so that we can see who's doing this kind of thing to us. Bromsgrove: Conservative. Shame on them.