Steel Ourselves

Steel was the most controversial nationalisation of the Attlee years, and the only one that the subsequent Conservative Government reversed, although the Labour Government after that reversed the reversal. Now even Reform UK wants to undo the Thatcher Government's privatisation. If in this case, then why not in every other? Reform also wants to make the public sector Buy British. But then, so do the Liberal Democrats. Everyone who is neither the floundering Government nor the irrelevant Official Opposition is becoming the Workers Party. Beginning at Runcorn and Helsby, vote for the real thing.

Would that all wounds from the 1980s might heal so easily. The Hillsborough law will not be brought before Parliament by next Tuesday, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the disaster. No, there is not already a duty of candour on the part of public officials in relation to court proceedings and public inquiries. At this rate, there never will be.

Meanwhile, report stage of the Assisted Suicide Bill has been put back from 25 April to 16 May. Will Third Reading follow immediately, or will there be a further delay? The longer this Bill stayed off the Statute Book, the better. The Government has pretty much abandoned it, and the ambitious Kim Leadbeater with it. Keep writing to your MP.

We may soon have to campaign just as hard against digital ID, at the moment probably as popular as assisted suicide was until people were confronted with the practicalities. Identity cards, however understood in accordance with the technology of the day, have been the solution in search of a problem at least since Michael Howard was Home Secretary, and that was a long time ago. Tony Blair did in fact secure passage of the Identity Cards Act 2006, but so little came of it that when it was repealed by the Identity Documents Act 2010, then that was unamended and unopposed, without even any compensation for those who had forked out for the cards. Did you ever see one?

It was supposed to have been about terrorism, as everything was in those days, but the latest excuse is the boat people, as it is for everything these days. Yet just as all the 9/11 bombers had had genuine identity documents, and just as identity cards had done nothing to prevent the Madrid bombing, so the small boats are coming from France, which already has identity cards. The fallback option will be to argue that this was necessary to keep under-18s off social media, and thus to preclude events such as those depicted in Adolescence. Again, though, even in its own terms, does that work on the Continent?

In any case, Keir Starmer has reiterated his commitment to lowering the voting age to 16. Old enough to vote, but not to be on Facebook (which I still cannot access, bah!)? I am almost tempted to hope that Starmer succeeded with this one, only to see the girls vote Green and the boys vote for the most populist candidate on any given ballot paper. The second part of that, though, would feed into something else, as may well be Starmer's reason for still wanting this change. Adolescence and the carefully arranged response to it will make it easier to argue that what those boys needed was a dose of conscription. Watch out for conscription as the answer to everything. Unopposed by the Conservatives, Reform, the Lib Dems, or even the SNP. Reform, in particular, will lose the young male vote over this, and deservedly so.