I’m always on the lookout for useful vignettes of what is wrong with the present British government. There are many naturally, but yesterday the perfect example appeared on the BBC.

Reporter Richard Bilton drew our attention to the extensive recording of every journey we make on major roads across the country.

Each time we stray off the country lanes, our number-plates are recorded by “sophisticated” software, checked for dodginess — undefined — and logged on a massive and growing database somewhere in the heart of … who knows where.

The police and other “agencies” of government are able to access this information at will, and use it in whatever way they see fit. Bilton’s point was that no one regulates this activity. Indeed, it’s hard to see how anyone could.

First, he approached the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, and asked who regulates the information. On camera, Thomas said, “We don’t regulate the police’s use of this information”. No one does.

Bilton trudged along to the Home Secretary, the infamous Jacqui Smith. With that wide-eyed and terrified expression common to many MPs these days, she tumbled out her answer to the same question: “The police are regulated by law and the Information Commission …”.

Bilton replied that Richard Thomas had told him they are not regulated by them.

Smith shot back, “We will have to look at that again and at further legislation”.

Call me pedantic but, was she lying, or didn’t she know that the Information Commissioner was not charged with checking this practice? Either way, she should be sacked.

But then that’s typical of the way Labour fudges every aspect of its performance. Jacqui Smith is just not very good at dissembling the facts, try though she might. We’ve become so used to it, we tend to shrug it off now. We shouldn’t. It’s yet another fraudulent element in the “new politics”.

I once worked at the Central Office of Information in Hercules House, London, centre of the government’s information service. The COI has a distinguished reputation stretching back to the war. Since 1997, the operation has been taken over by red-top tabloid journalists and bears little resemblance to its old independent role.

Therein lies the faultline at the heart of this government. There’s nobody charged with standing back in total neutrality and assessing real-time performance, compliance, and the fundamental integrity of the system. Sham operations pass for oversight.

Gordon Brown, who has dominated domestic decision-making for 12 years, first as Chancellor, now as Prime Minister, has run a Brezhnevian Soviet system of government.

The Supreme Soviet is centred on Downing Street, not Parliament, which has atrophied disastrously under his regime.

Local soviets — or quangos, as they are called — run almost everything below central government level and are populated by carefully selected members of the tribe. They genuflect automatically to everything that Downing Street wants, without being told. Thus, if they slip up, as is usually the case, no smoking gun is found that can implicate the Supremo in the cock up.

This is typical of revolutionary cadres throughout history, as they seize power for themselves and mangle every decent impulse in the system.

They then destroy the national culture piece by piece. For without that, no sense of coherence remains. What was once “a people” becomes putty in the hands of cynical operatives who “do politics” in place of governing for all.

We have been had. Taken over by a political class whose motives are not of these islands but of distant lands dominated by warlords and mercenaries. They have polluted the system, destroyed the economy, the Constitution, and our country.

Forget calling for “time to reflect”, as many are, we must get rid of them now. A General Election is the foremost imperative of our times.

John Evans

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