As the great political analyst Eric Morecambe might have said of Gordon Brown’s Government: “What do you think of it so far? Rubbish!” After binning an election he was about to announce, a green-gilled Mr Brown has now dumped the plan for a household “rubbish tax” hours before it was wheeled out. If the Prime Minister continues shredding nerves and policies, his tabloid reputation as “Bottler Brown” can only grow – and not because of any commitment to recycling glass.

Of course, it is no bad thing to see the back of rubbish proposals to levy charges on householders who do not recycle “properly”. As useless as it would be intrusive, the plan to impose taxes and “chip-and-bin” spies to make us all waste precious energy filling multi-hued boxes and slop buckets with stuff fit only for the dustbin almost seemed designed to cause maximum annoyance for minimum impact on the environment.

But these unfit-for-public-consumption policies have been dumped purely out of expediency. The official prejudice behind the proposals remains, and will soon be recycled in new packaging. That prejudice says that we are all irresponsible wasters, guilty of the eco-sin of gluttony, and must cut our consumption. Call me a crazy old libertarian Marxist, but I thought the increase in waste was a side product of a positive development – the growth in wealth. Our rich society should be able to cope without ordering us, in the words of the Simpsons billionaire Monty Burns, to “start scrabbling around in our garbage like starving racoons”.

The mean, green spirit that gave rise to these policies was recently captured in The Human Footprint on Channel 4 (cue panto booing). In the programme all the loo rolls and stuff that one is estimated to consume was piled up under the slogan “It’s what your life amounts to”. Speak for yourselves. Time to bin not just rubbish taxes but all the trash talk depicting humanity as a heap of toxic waste.

Debate around the 40th anniversary of the Abortion Act has focused on technical questions of time limits and foetal viability. Once, we had a more honest argument about the moral and political issues involved. On the 30th anniversary of the Act, I interviewed the pro-choice players from the 1967 campaign. For the women campaigners, legalising abortion had been about equality. For the late Roy Jenkins – by then a Lib Dem lord, but in 1967 the liberal-minded Labour Home Secretary – it was informed by his belief that what others called the permissive society was a more civilised society. Lord Jenkins told me that he was “very much against interfering with people’s liberties, unless you can show overwhelming social cause”, and that “this leads me to be liberal on abortion laws; it would also lead me never to vote for banning foxhunting, so I apply the rule indiscriminately”.

Can you imagine any home secretary thinking or talking so freely today?

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