The nanny state strikes again!

Perhaps that heading should be 'the nanny supermarket'.

There's a blog in England called Nanny Knows Best. It seeks to document the various and sundry stupidities of the Nanny State, which tries to control everything and everyone in the interests of an ephemeral and vacuous public safety.

The latest idiocy to catch my eye on that blog is a lulu. Would you believe that teaspoons may be murder weapons - and you therefore shouldn't be allowed to buy them without ID?

... one of his wife's colleagues recently experienced when shopping in a Halifax branch of Asda [a British supermarket].

The lady was trying to buy some teaspoons, and was flabbergasted to find that she needed ID.

The assistant informed her that it was because someone had murdered someone with a teaspoon, and therefore ID was now required.

What complete and utter bollocks!

By that reasoning they should also require id for numerous other times that they sell (lest they be used to kill people) eg:

- stockings can be used to strangle
- socks can be used to chock people
- cleaning fluids can be used to poison
- forks can be used to stab people
- frozen legs of lamb can be used to bludgeon people with etc

Asda are a bunch of Nanny loving twats!

There's more at the link.

I particularly enjoyed some of the reader responses to this report. Here are a few.

• Teatowel and a couple of bottle of diet cream-soda and you've got all the equipment for waterboarding an ASDA manager.
• Just about anything can be used to kill someone. Years ago I attended a 'demonstration' put on to show how every day objects could be used to take lives (please note this was a legitimate lecture for those working in the area of scenes of crime and forensics, I was not training to be a ninja assassin :) ). One such object was the humble credit card so one wonders whether ASDA will soon refuse to handle them lest an irate customer, forced to prove their identity when buying teaspoons viciously slay the assistant with their VISA card.
• ID for teaspoons - spot on. This action alone will stop the mass killings on our streets, carried out by teaspoon wielding gang members. I applaud ASDA for helping Nanny protect us. As an added precaution I have removed all the teaspoons from my house,lest a tragedy akin to one of those American school shootings should occur if my kids get hold of these evil weapons of mass destruction.
• Dammit, if the government are going to try to take away my constitutional (I've heard that we actually do have a constitution, but that it's spread over several documents and buried somewhere in the British Library underneath the 1982 Buster Annual) rights this way, I'm going to carry the biggest calibre teaspoon I can find.
  I recommend the 7.62 mm GPTS, which is capable of 100 forehead taps per minute, under ideal conditions. It's also capable of a form of tracer fire, as long as you put fluorescent paint on the convex side.
  I will give up my teaspoon when they prise it from my cold, dead body.
  
  

Well, the British may be fated to live under a nanny state (they elected the politicians who built it, after all), but at least they haven't lost their sense of humor!



Peter