A Britishpersons Home

A pamphlet Has been published today by the Centre for Policy Studies entitled Crossing the Threshold: 266 ways in which the state can enter your home.

.

The author, Harry Snook, a barrister, has identified the recent explosion in the powers given to officials, with or without a warrant, to make a mockery of that old boast that "an Englishman's (persons) home is his castle", by invading our homes andbusinesses. In the 1970s, 31 such powers were created, 62 in the 1980s, 67 in the 1990s.

.

These "entry powers" range from the right of Ofcom to search your home for an unlicensed television set, to those of social services to check whether it is being used for unlicensed "early years child-minding". In almost every case fines of up to £5,000 can be imposed for "obstructing" officials, and more such powers are introduced every year. (One of the most alarming examples is the draconian powers given to bailiffs under the Tribunals, Courts & Enforcement Bill now going through Parliament.)

.

Useful though this pamphlet may be, its message will hardly come as a surprise. It highlights one aspect of a familiar feature of our time, reported here for many years. This is the unprecedented increase in the powers of the state over its citizens, giving officials ever more right to behave high-handedly and arbitrarily towards the public, which many have been only too quick to exercise.But this is one aspect of a wider revolution, whereby the powers of government, at every level, have shifted from elected politicians to anonymous armies of officialdom, who not only enforce the law but make it in the first place.
.
From Brussels, down through Whitehall, to our town halls (not to mention the proliferating government agencies), we are ruled by officials answerable, in effect, to no one but themselves and the shadowy system they serve.

.

One has only to look at any branch of government to see the extraordinary power and privilege our officials have won for themselves. A dozen years ago, the salary of our prime minister was £84,000. Today, in many local authorities, scores of officials earn more than that, with heads of department routinely drawing £120,000 or more a year.

.

At the other end of the system, where so many of our laws originate, how many people know that over 80 per cent of the laws that emerge from the EU are hardly seen by an elected politician? Not only are they negotiated and drafted by civilservants, it is also the officials who, through the Committee of Permanent Representatives, pass them into law. The idea that these directives and regulations are somehow debated by the Council of Ministers is just a convenient fiction, preserved, like much of the work of Parliament itself, to give the illusion that we still live in what can be called a democracy.

.

It is hardly surprising that the ranks of officialdom should continually be awarding themselves new powers to enter our homes, to check on and "license" almost everything we do - because no one has power any longer to control them. Such is the grim reality to which this CPS pamphlet bears yet further, but alas impotent, witness.