Bernard Ingham: Praise for Pickles for honouring election pledge

Let us praise Eric Pickles, the so-called Communities Secretary, for his Yorkshire common sense.

Just before the Bank Holiday weekend, he wrote to local authorities telling them to act against unauthorised gipsy encampments and to make sure their planning officers were on hand to block illegal developments.

Let us now pause to savour the spluttering sound coming from the army of do-gooders who would excuse almost any breach of the law by minorities. They are no doubt as disgusted as they would be if illegal immigrants were deservedly sent packing.

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Yet Pickles is merely honouring what it said on the Tories' tin during the election – "freedom, fairness and responsibility". He is

reconciling the freedom of the road with fairness and responsibility to the good people of this country who should not have their land appropriated from under their noses and then built on without the sanction of the planning laws by which they live.

We need more like Eric in this coalition Government if it is to bring freedom, fairness and responsibility back into our daily lives. Britain is being broken on the rack of spurious – and irresponsible – compassion reinforced by human rights.

Just let me remind you of a selection – and only a selection – of the things that happened last month while we were electing and painfully acquiring our rickety new coalition.

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Judges allowed a prisoner remanded for wounding to go home to feed his dog and lifted an 11pm curfew on two alleged drug dealers so they could indulge their sport of carp fishing.

We learned that Surrey and Northamptonshire police forces employ more civilians than police. This might explain why forces generally spent 23m on private security firms to guard their stations and why King's Lynn library hired bouncers to stop yobs intimidating the premises.

It does not remotely explain why an Exeter policeman, an inquest heard, told a chap who asked him to rescue a drunk from drowning: "No, but you can. I am not allowed".

But what do you expect when the Home Office has authorised a Pagan Police Association giving the pagans in blue the right to eight public holidays a year?

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Then there is our precious freedom of speech: a Rotherham pensioner who, fed up with receiving election material, put a notice in his window saying "Get the lot out", only to be visited by police accusing him of being racist; a Christian street preacher in Workington put on a public order charge for saying homosexuality is sinful; and a magistrate sacked, but mercifully later reinstated, for calling two lads who desecrated Blackburn Cathedral "absolute scum".

As for local authorities, Milton Keynes council, we discover, employs 300 translators in 105 languages and Swansea council threatened a 95-year-old widow with legal action for putting an empty butter tub in the wrong recycling bag.

My favourite is the MoD advising women – repeat, women – in the front line to carry condoms because so many have become pregnant in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now, I am long enough in the tooth as a journalist and press officer to know that there may be an element of journalistic licence in these tales. But even if only half of them are entirely accurate, you know,

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if you hadn't already realised it, that you no longer live in Great Britain but Bonkers Britain.

So what is the coalition going to do about it? I would not count on too many Ministers following Pickles over the top against the forces of darkness and discrimination. This being so, we must make them act to end the lunacy.

Already they have, not surprisingly, gone soft on divorcing us from the Brussels' human rights mafia and enacting our own charter of responsibilities. That is a serious blow to any hope of restoring freedom, fairness and responsibility to this land.

But all is not lost. We must now apply one simple practical test to the public spirit – indeed, sanity – of our elected representatives. Are they prepared systematically to raise absurdities of the kind I have listed above, preferably at Prime Minister's Questions, but also whenever a Cabinet Minister stands to account in the Commons?

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This would be the exercise of freedom, fairness and responsibility for it would test the veracity of the allegations and either provide a rational explanation or raise the pressure on our society to sort out its priorities.

If, however, our MPs are found wanting, we must get rid of them at the first opportunity and replace them with more like Eric Pickles.