A night of sheer misery.

First, bitter disappointment for Tottenham who beat the European champions by a mere 3-1.

Check out this footytube video and its commentary in French, where Gareth Bale is eloquently described as a TGV train as time after time he flies past one of the best full-backs in the world to lay on two superb goals.

Then a feeble showing by the Republicans in the USA, who failed to crush the Democrats once and for all. Sure, the Republicans won a load of House seats and governorships. But they failed to drive the wooden stake through the Vampire’s heart.

Last night the Vampire appeared on this side of the Atlantic, fangs bared, on the BBC regional news. In a story about a new high-speed train line to London.

The story focused on people who are unhappy about this, as they live close to the expected new train-line. One woman interviewed runs a horse business training riders. She said something to this effect:

I’ve been told that when an express passes, because of the noise the trainers could be out of communication with trainees for 25 seconds. So I might not get a licence to carry on operating, on Health and Safety grounds. 

Pause. Just think about that for a moment.

For centuries people have ridden horses and been trained to do so. And used their own judgement about how best to do that near railway tracks and other occasional disturbances. Now they can’t do so without a ‘licence’ from some or other bureaucracy, who on a whim may withdraw it.

There’s no specific Health and Safety rule which governs this situation. Only some general guidelines, and the bizarrely lurid busybody imagination of those anonymous bureaucrats who assert the right to interpret them and will call in state-backed armed force if necessary to impose their will.

These people can take a case like this and pore over it indefinitely, doing ‘risk assessments’ and comparative analysis’ and all the other vampirish things they do, as they suck our blood:

“We the people” has degenerated into “We the regulators, we the bureaucrats, we the permit-issuers”.

“Ignorantia juris non excusat” is one of the oldest concepts of civilized society. But today we’re all ignorant of the law, from the legislators who pass the laws unread to li’l ol’ you on the receiving end.

What of course was most disturbing was not this decision, but the way the horse woman was portrayed by the BBC describing her plight.

No anger. No determination to fight to the end to save her business. No seething resentment at this Liberal Fascist hammer-blow:

A final vital UK civilisational point. British freedoms are not written down in a single accessible place. They emerged over centuries in a higgledy-piggledy way, scattered in common law norms, statute law, precedents, interpretations, ‘traditions’, prerogatives, ‘conventions’ and other devices. They combine to require unusual levels of personal integrity and responsibility from our leaders and civil servants.

 

The main objection to this situation is that it is hard to fathom. That also can be a strength – if something needs fixing in the light of experience, it is not too difficult to work out an ad hoc sensible outcome which may or may not turn into a new convention or norm.

 

However, one serious weakness in the unique British model is that having grown bit by bit, our liberties and principles can erode bit by bit. We may never notice the process happening. Even if we do, how to stop it?

 

… This for me is the main danger in the UK’s current binge of Big Statism as inflated by unrelenting EU requirements.

 

Not just a sly erosion of responsibility and our freedoms. Much worse, erosion of the very idea of responsibility, of freedom as something worth having – and worth fighting for.

 

Arrangements of an astonishingly subtle sort which have helped define some of the highest standards for public life and process ever seen in human history might casually come to be dismissed as boring, old-fashioned – not part of the ‘contemporary narrative’.

 

Is there a point at which Liberal Fascism via Big Government wins?

 

Has an unrecognised tipping-point been reached – and (worse) been passed? When state-sponsored passive cynicism and attendant public spending are so enormous a part of our lives that instead of our owning the state, the bland state owns us?

 

How would we tell?

 

Would we care?

Oh well.

Come on you Spurs.