A cry for help.

Ok Wembley, I need your help.

I've tried to give this Government the benefit of the doubt (no really I have) but stories like these three listed below seem to confirm all my worse suspisions:

1) Hampering Democracy

Councillors have been banned from discussing local park-and-ride schemes if they own a car under an ethical watchdog created by John Prescott. The Deputy Prime Minister is accused today of undermining local democracy and stifling free speech by imposing "draconian" rules on thousands of councillors.

Even councillors who have been elected specifically to fight a particular issue have fallen foul of the rules and found themselves told they cannot speak or vote on it. A damning report reveals how local authority members are being barred from speaking or voting on subjects simply because they are perceived to have taken a position on the issue.


2) Labour Party officials have met to work out ways of closing hospitals without jeopardising marginal seats:

Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, called for those at the meeting to be provided with “heat maps”, showing marginal Labour seats where closures or reconfigurations of health services could cost votes.


3) Government attacks on Privacy:

Last week, in a significant announcement issued under the guise of an innocuous-sounding "information-sharing vision statement", the Government proposed to reverse the presumptions of confidentiality under which Whitehall has, until now, conducted its relationships with businesses and individuals. Departments will be able to share personal information obtained for one purpose with other departments that might want it for an entirely different reason. In effect, they will be able to gather all this data in one place, something we were always assured would not happen.

[...]

Once you accept that the government has the right to know where you are at all times, to demand that you tell its agents when you move home or to render up your private musings at its behest, then you have changed the nature of the individual's relationship to the state in a way that is totally alien to this country's historic, though ill-defined, covenant between the rulers and the ruled.

Please explain how these stories aren't just signs of a hopelessly corrupt, undemocratic, tired, meddling Government (we'll leave aside the cash for peerages scandal and increasing authoritarianism).

Yours sincerely,

Floating voter