Blimey.

Things have got bad here, when even the Guardian thinks the British government have gone mad:

Every day, there is some new example of madness or spite perpetrated by a government that seems now in its final gibbering months to be waging war on normality itself.

Remember the astounding claim that this Labour Government have created 3000 new criminal offences since coming to office?

I wonder what the best approach is for an incoming Conservative government. Abolishing boldly a thousand of them still leaves 2000 more out there.

Obviously the right answer in principle is to abolish all of them, every single one, apart from those very few offences where some serious and reasonable updates have been made to core criminal law. That would make the point that this neurotic collectivist bullying will not be tolerated ever again, even if various ‘social gains’ are thrown out with this stinking bathwater

But how? A Great Repeal Bill as suggested in that Guardian article by Henry Porter has its attractions. But it would be quite a piece of work even to draft it.

Wasn’t there somewhere in ancient Greece where those who proposed laws would be thrown from a cliff or torn in half if lawmakers thought the proposal was bad, an incentive structure which tended to encourage very careful thought among would-be law proposers?

Bring back that fine tradition? 

Update: relax folks, I see that he was writing for the Observer, with the piece appearing on the Guardian CiF website.