Gimmick is now a timebomb

IF ever an election gimmick was destined to come back and haunt a political party, then it must be New Labour's ill-considered family credit system.

Desperate to cling on to the fast-haemorrhaging support of middle class professionals, it seemed a perfect way of sowing a vast number of electoral seeds and reaping the resulting harvest.

Trouble is, the spinmeisters had not reckoned on one crucial factor - British bureaucracy's inability to get anything right.

When this is coupled with Bumbledom's hypocritical, fascist zeal in persecuting all who make a mistake - or not, as the case may be - then you're talking timebombs.

Already, vast numbers of people have been threatened by jumped-up little Hitlers, goose-stepping into their lives and screaming all manner of threats - usually down the phone.

I know of several people who have been overpaid family credit and are now being bullied to pay back money to which they genuinely thought they were entitled. Multiply that average and you're talking about a lot of misery.

This issue was the subject of a recent television programme that highlighted the plight of a woman who was facing the prospect of selling her home because of an administrative tangle that was most certainly not of her making.

More and more, ordinary citizens are finding themselves in trouble with the heartless, inflexible machinery of the state.

Don't say that this has always gone on, for it hasn't. Britain is becoming an increasingly unpleasant place to live.

However, the repression has not really started at all, for identity cards have yet to arrive.

But when they do, the long-suffering and often stupid British will eventually realise just how rapidly 1,000 years of freedom can vanish down the plughole.