THE NANNY STATE MEETS BENNY HILL

An interesting website, Samizdata.net is run by a gaggle of people who describe themselves as: "a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. ...We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, libertarians, extropians, futurists, 'Porcupines', Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe."

Sometimes their stuff is hard to take, but hard to dispute, and the tension of the conflict makes it interesting reading.

And sometimes it's hard to tell from comedy. Here is the real world in today's European Nanny State.

Overseas readers often scoff at my pessimism about the state we are in in Britain. Scoff may be the wrong word. Scoffing is now under close supervision:

David Ashley, headmaster of Greenslade primary, says that pupils who bring in packed lunches “are allowed chocolate on a biscuit but not a Mars bar”. If such sweeties are spotted, parents are called in for a quiet word.

At Charlton Manor primary, the head, Tim Baker, says: “Children get stickers for healthy boxes . . . If a child brings in a chocolate bar, we take it out of the lunchbox and give it back to the parent at the end of the day.” Pupils give each other away, he confides: “They say, ‘Miss, he’s got sweets in his box’.”

That's not a joke. An agency of the British Government supervises childrens' lunch boxes brought from home, and takes candy from the kids, relying on the little tikes to rat each other out. The crime? Mum sent a Mars bar.

I couldn't make this up.