Nanny's Legislation Fetish

Nanny loves to legislate, she believes that if you pass enough laws then society’s ills and problems will simply go away.

A prime example of her legislation fetish is the Anti Social Behaviour Order (ASBO). This is designed to provide a “cordon sanitaire” around those in society, who can best be described as “a pain in the arse”; who make other peoples’ lives a misery, by loutish and threatening behaviour.

The ASBO is all very well and indeed “ring fencing” society’s scum is, in principle, an excellent idea. However, there are a few practical problems; which Nanny, in her usual haste to legislate and grab the headlines, has conveniently ignored:

• There are already a plethora of laws in place that can deal with these people; eg it is illegal to steal, and illegal to use threatening behaviour.



• The ASBO can only work, if it can be enforced. Once you have a large number of ASBO’s in place, Nanny will have quite a difficult job monitoring 24 hours a day the activities of those on whom the ASBO has been served. Nanny is of course working on electronic tagging, but this is still a little way off.



• Once an ASBO has been breached, you are in effect back to square one. The scumbag who has breached it, has to be punished via the method that would have been employed in the first place ie jail.



• There is a danger that the ASBO will become the “weapon of choice” to be used against society’s scumbags, without using the more appropriate and effective tools already at society’s disposal (eg jail). I understand that the Daily Mail has reported the story about a family who are so unpleasant, that an ASBO has been taken out against the mother, father and three sons; banning them from associating even with each other. Indeed, because they have threatened the police, they are also banned from going into the police station. Now call me simple, but shouldn’t these scumbags just be locked up?

Nanny doesn’t really care, her prime objective is to appear to be doing something about the problem; she does not have the time, energy or intellectual ability to think through the consequences of her actions.