Here’s a piece I have written for The Commentator picking up a baffling Guardian piece yesterday by Martin Kettle, in which he rightly attacks Labour’s horrible proliferation of new regulation and criminal offences as "an insult to a society of free people", but then bewails the efforts of the Coalition government to do something about it.

Thus:

Yes, all those regulations and offences (and the laws which support them) are insulting a society of free people. But look out of the window. Life goes on. Look at the British public – they don’t mind being insulted! Much better to leave them well alone.

This whole issue goes to a deeper question, the morality of modern government itself.

Most normal people would think that someone who piles up unmanageable credit-card debts is behaving in a reckless, stupid way. Attempts by that person to explain away such behaviour by appealing to weakness of will in the face of overwhelming temptation merely evoke pity from the rest of us:

“You’re saying that you weren’t stupid – you were merely weak? Yet you still expect the rest of us who did not get into uncontrollable debt to pay for your errors?”

It follows that any government which runs up staggering, unmanageable national debts and sends the bill to current and future taxpayers is not merely stupid – it is a priori immoral.

Yet that is what we now see in too many countries, including our own, as one incremental teensy-weensy piece of More Government inexorably prompts the next piece, and the next, and so it all grows like a cancer and starts to become system-threatening.

The Labour leadership evince no remorse at their own roles in piling on debt and oppressive legislation, regulations and tax rules. On the contrary. They brazenly use the same argument which Slobodan Milosevic for years deployed with the gullible Serbian population:

“You may think that I have got you into this mess, and you may even be right. But who other than me is an expert on messes of this magnitude? Trust only me to lead you in the right direction. And if you think things are getting even worse, that’s a sign that we are at least moving together.”

The point?

Until the Guardian and TUC and civil society come up with a workable and detailed plan to deal with Labour’s insult of a legacy, they should keep very quiet – and very contrite.