Patience running out with excessive government control

Here is a letter in today's Daily Telegraph which I have decided to reprint in full. It's from Martin Moyes of Holt, Wiltshire.

"There has to be a rational explanation for the electorate being so angry about MPs' expenses and, at the same time, the MPS not 'getting it' at all.

It is not really how extravagant they have been - the sum of all their expenses is less than a drop in the ocean of Government spending.

No, the outrage is a measure of how boxed in - Shakespeare would have said 'cabined, cribbed, confined' - the rest of us are.

The comparison between them and us is extraordinary in the matter of personal taxation. Correspondents have given numerous examples of the lawmakers exempting themselves from their own strictures on the rest of us.

But the disparity is there throughout our daily lives, where the innocent are watched, measured, recorded, classified, threatened, fined, nannied and generally oppressed.

The expenses debacle is the first symptom of a desperate underlying malaise which will only be cured when the whole purpose of government changes from 'control' to 'enable'.

Sherlock Holmes put it neatly with typical understatement: 'The Englishman is a patient creature, but at present his temper is a little inflamed and it would be wise not to push him too far.'"