28th November:

You may love them or you may hate them, but you have to hand it to the French. Although they have a massive public sector and civil service, and the State seems to loom large in most aspects of daily life, the French still have a very highly evolved sense of personal freedom. And they guard it jealously. They don’t really mind their high-profile public figures having an assorted collection of mistresses and offspring lodged in Parisian penthouse apartments at the public’s expense as long as it doesn’t affect that official’s ability to do their job and serve the public. At the first whiff of a plan to increase the amount of personal data held by government bodies as part of the existing national identity card scheme, however, they are rioting and burning their livestock on the Champs Elysees.

We Brits, however, seem happy to stand around in a lemming-like trance while the government quietly but rigorously strip us of our personal rights and freedoms replacing them with legislation that treats us like idiots and spells out (in very small words of two syllables or less) exactly what we’re allowed to get up to during the rare moments when we’re not being caught on CCTV or having our supermarket purchasing habits being dissected by some supercomputer deep in the bowels of Tesco Towers.

Take driving, for example. Some insurance companies have been trialling a scheme whereby young drivers (who are statistically at higher risk of accidents than their more mature counterparts) agree not to drive between the hours of midnight and 6am in return for a smaller premium for their insurance. This contract is not based simply on good faith, though. Cars are fitted with black boxes that monitor usage, so if the car is started and driven during the night the policyholder is deemed in breach and receives a bill for his trouble. Without wishing to be deemed a conspiracy theorist (not again, anyway), this is potentially the thin end of the wedge. We are currently moving gradually but inexorably from static speed cameras to cameras that measure average speed over a fixed distance. How much longer can we realistically be from an obligatory GPS black box in the car that continuously monitors speed and triggers a fixed penalty fine and licence points if the driver happens to transgress the speed limit?

We already have certain High Street banks seriously contemplating charging holders of standard current accounts an annual fee for the account unless they deposit a minimum of 1500 pounds in the account every month. Let’s just conjure with and savour that idea again: banks charging you for the privilege of keeping you money. Banks penalising you for not giving them enough of your hard-earned folding.

Jeeves, book us on the next flight to Paris and don’t forget to pack the sacrificial geese!