Late in the pantomime season Ken Livingstone, the Miserabilist of London, is staging a new version of Aladdin. At B&Q stores this weekend Londoners can get “new bulbs for old” by swapping incandescent lightbulbs for free low-energy ones (only two each, the genie of the lightbulb being less slightly generous than the one in the lamp).

So far, so what. But what turned me off was the mayor calling this eco-stunt a “lightbulb amnesty”. An amnesty is “a period during which offenders are exempt from punishment”, as when police turn a blind eye to those handing in illegal weapons. A lightbulb amnesty implies that the merciful authorities will let us carbon offenders dump our tungsten timebombs and avoid the electric chair.

The economic and energy arguments about different bulbs are as dull and cold as the light thrown out by the current low-energy efforts. (Perhaps those greens who claim these are bright and warm just eat more carrots than me.) But call it a lightbulb amnesty and you can reduce the issue to a simple moral message about the power of evil.

It seems that the use of energy and production of carbon has become the standard by which all human activity is judged. Low is seen as good, higher bad, regardless of how it might illuminate our existence. What next? An auto amnesty to exchange the car for a family rickshaw? Or an infant amnesty where we can swap our carbon-guzzling kids for free-range chicks?

When an alternative scare story about mercury in low-energy bulbs arose (visions of the health and safety police swooping to change broken ones), Livingstone responded: “We shouldn't be too alarmist.” How true. Of course, it is not at all alarmist for the mayor to tell us we must switch to bulbs that save a halfpenny an hour in order to “avoid catastrophic climate change”.

So the genius of Thomas Edison is reinvented as a crime against the climate, while dullard politicians assume the power to tell us how to run our own homes. The lights are dimming, if not yet going off, over Europe. Welcome to the new dark age.

The Government's new non-educational brainwave for schools is to give parents daily online updates on their child's every move in the classroom. This surveillance system will be two-way: schools “could also monitor how often parents checked their child's progress”. The authorities won't learn that some of us don't want even more parental involvement. All we want is a properly funded local school staffed by good teachers that we can leave to get on with it.

On Saturday my wife and I saw Alan Bennett's brilliant The History Boys. The inspirational teacher holds his top class behind locked doors - not to interfere with the boys (he does that in public on his motorbike), but to avoid interference from anybody else. Today that would be deemed a worse offence than using a normal light bulb in a classroom.

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