How many people voted for the thousands of new “criminal” offences brought in over the past few years? How many of these exciting new crimes were brought in after a ‘consultation’ exercise, rather than a proper debate and vote in Parliament? How many times have I written about this Government’s sinister determination to criminalise as many people as possible and pretend that a middle-class motorist doing a few miles an hour above the limit on a deserted motorway is just as much a villain as an inner-city mugger?

That’s what’s happening again in this case. It’s all in line with Labour’s love of surveillance and snooping and treating us all like criminals.

No one voted for officials to be given the power to come into our homes to prod our roof insulation and measure our conservatories, to use satellites to assess the size of our gardens for taxation purposes, or to rip open our bin-liners to check for the “wrong” kind of rubbish. No one voted for the millions of CCTV and speed cameras on every street corner, or for the increasingly intrusive amount of personal information demanded even to get a bus pass.