Invade Privacy and Let the Industry off Scot Free.

Two new legislation on the table and one announcement on the banking industry and to me it's totally back to front and completely out of touch with reality.

First of the bat are plans to ban smoking in cars where children are present. Who would ever say that smoking when your child is in the car is a delightful habit?! What father would protest this bill? No one can come out and say this is a bad idea or that it's ok to smoke with children are around. However without an argument for the negative it doesn't mean the government should legislate control over an individuals lifestyle choice. The car at the end of the day is a vehicle in which you lose all your privacy. Cameras watching your speed. Police watching your driving and holding the right to stop and search you whenever they want. Government and companies ensuring your car's innards are in respectable order and so forth. And all this is needed to ensure road safety and a high standard of public safety. However new technology which auto tracks your windscreen and watches you from afar has already been piloted across Britain. Putting away the mobile phone is a good idea but being fined for popping a sweet or switching the radio on is backdoor secret surveillance and dare I say, totalitarianism. You can't smoke at work, in the pub and rarely at home now everyone has jumped on the anti-smoking banned wagon (which I am part of btw). Now you can't even roll down your window and have a smoke when your stressed out from grid lock, the kids are screaming in the back seat and your wife just left you for spending to much time at work.

It's a horrible image but I don't think the government or police should be concerned with our private habits and indeed their role should be protecting not suppressing them.

Legislation number two is tougher regulation on Sun beds, or tanning salons as they are called now. Again what argument or specialist is going to stand up and defend the right to have artificially brown skin, but I question the government when they want to clamp down on unmanned salons and underage bronzing addicts when hedgefund managers, banking executives and the like are off gambling with the public's savings; and after losing them ask for a government handout. When looking around the commons it is more likely that the sun kissed skin of our right honourable MPs is not from overdosing on UV beds but from vacations in the Caribbean or Sunday afternoons sailing on their moats which they fiddled through tax payer funded expenses. It almost too ridiculous to believe.

Looks like today Darling will announce that regulation was not to blame for the financial crises. To an extent tough regulation in the UK would not have stopped a global economic turn down but it would mean our banks would not have been such a major part of it. Regulation is what's needed and its what the public want too. If someone commits a crime you may blame the police for not catching them before they done it but you never let the criminal get off scott free on the same presumption.