In Nosemonkey’s excellent rant he points out that local councils are going to be given the power to create by-laws without recourse to central government and – yes! – impose ‘on the spot’ fines. (The fines are so named because the reasons for issuing them are thought up in much the same place. ‘Back of a fag packet fines’ doesn’t have the same ring.)

With summary justice being the lubricant of this Government’s sweaty authoritarian fantasies, we shouldn’t really be surprised by this. It comes in the same week that John Reid has announced that, after their countries’ accession to the EU in January, Bulgarians and Romanians could face an – altogether now – on the spot fine if found to be working illegally in the UK.

As critics have pointed out, nobody at the Home Office has thought through what will happen if these people can’t or won’t pay. Expecting John Reid, the Tories or the right-wing press to consider the humanitarian implications of making already poor people poorer is, needless to say, a bridge too far.

Yes, such fines seem to be the answer to all our prayers from dogshit on the pavements to shifty foreigners stealing our jobs.

It’s to be wondered if this doesn’t present a solution to the backlog of terrorism cases currently ‘challenging‘ the Crown Prosecution Service. Let’s not bother with all those tedious trials (especially if the evidence is as thin as in the not-ricin and not red mercury trials) and legally ambiguous control orders and internment.

Let’s just bankrupt the buggers.