Britain’s new coalition government has launched a website asking people to nominate some of the “intrusive and unecessary” laws imposed on a luckless nation during the disastrous Blair-Brown years. Good idea. As the Daily Telegraph reports, Deputy PM Nick Clegg (ugly words to write) has asked people to concentrate on three areas:

Laws that have eroded civil liberties. Regulations that stifle the way charities and businesses work. Laws that are not required and which are likely to see law-abiding citizens criminalised.

Sounds good to me; here’s the site. But, as Raedwald reports, there’s a catch:

The site has been flooded, overwhelmed and filled with folk wanting the smoking ban repealed; this single subject outdoes all others in terms of comments, numbers of votes and the like. But clearly this isn’t the result Cleggy wanted – so the site’s administrators are doing everything they can to disguise the fact. They’ve hidden ’smoking’ from the big topic sidebar but included ‘business regulations’ in there. They ‘hide’ posts so that no individual smoking post can attract top numbers, and the search engine is utterly farcical. There are dozens of posts complaining about this distorting admin . . . which have also been well hidden and difficult to find. As an example of how a risibly biased and corrupt ‘consultation’ can be manipulated as well by the current government as it was by the last, this web page has no equal.

Nick Clegg explains the situation here:

Of course there are other suggestions which aren’t going to be taken up by this government . . . the introduction of the death penalty or changing the smoking ban; but at least the debate is now really alive.

It’s the “of course” that gets me. That, and the weird introduction of the death penalty into the discussion. Does Clegg think that voters are really that stupid? Oh, wait.