No matter how bad the economy gets and no matter how desperate the national situation looks, nothing will stop the government coming up with crackpot ideas. Today it's dog insurance and dog chips - the electronic ones implanted in the neck for identification. This really is an idea dreamt up in one of the darker reaches of the asylum.
What they are concerned about, or so they tell us, is the numbers of dangerous and often illegal dogs being kept as fashion accessories by young thugs, dogs bred for fighting and dogs - very dangerous ones - kept for protection. How will dog insurance help? OK, so a dog is insured so that compensation can be paid to anyone attacked or just bitten by a dog but the people who own and breed the most dangerous dogs will not bother with insurance. Who will decide the premiums and on what basis. We are told that insurance will cost £600 per year - which seems like plenty. Will they get no claims bonuses for good behaviour? And who will police this? Will the Police/RSPCA be going out on dog patrols to find the uninsured dogs? Already in this H&S obsessed world, dogs are treated as though they are as dangerous as Indonesian dragons, when the majority of them are quite harmless. Will all dogs have to be insured? Does it include vicious, people scaring Yorkshire Terriers and Chihuahuas?
This is just another piece of legislation by a government that does not understand that they are in office primarily to manage not just to give the impression that they are doing something. Just as with their data bases and identity cards they cannot distinguish between collecting buckets of data and having data bases that monitor the people and things that matter. The place to hide a book is in a library; but it is much easier to find a book hidden in a library with 500 books than one with 25,000. The government's policy will put the books in the library but will make every specific book impossible to find. We have had many incidents over recent years of sex crimes committed by men who were on the record as sex offenders - in some cases as repeat sex offenders - yet monitoring and control was totally inadequate. The system for keeping track was there yet its working was hopelessly inadequate. And so the government goes for more legislation to keep track of more and more people in the hope that the blunderbuss approach will either produce some results or will deter the real criminals.
In practice the dog insurance scheme will not work, it will cost a fortune and in fifty years time, it will be abandoned - consigned to the grave in which it should have been buried on day one.
What will be their daft idea for Wednesday?
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