I ALWAYS get depressed in the new year when I find out that, yet again, I have been omitted from the honours list. Perhaps it was just an oversight, or maybe they don't have a category for services to common sense and plain speaking.

It may be just as well because I recently discovered that the motto for the Order of the British Empire is For God and Empire.

As most people - especially trendy members of the Church of England - deny the existence of either, it may well be time to introduce new orders of merit for the great and good.

There should be a special pie in the sky award for anyone who can think of anything worthwhile to put in Peter Mandelsons Millenium White Elephant (sorry Dome) before the turn of the century comes round.

There should also be an anti-claptrap award for anyone in public life who can speak intelligible English for at least two minutes without descending into airy gibberish or logic that defies human comprehension.

The latest example of this tedious trend are the people behind the present campaign to reduce the drink-drive limit from 80mgs to 50mgs.

Everyone knows that drink drivers regularly ignore the law by consuming well in excess of the present limit before getting behind the wheel.

Instead of accepting this fact and trying to find more efficient ways to catch the criminals, (such as having police sitting near public house car parks waiting for drunks to stagger out to their cars) or increasing the penalties for those caught, the people behind the campaign are trying to make even those motorists who might have a single glass of wine with lunch into criminals as well.

The police support the campaign but this is only to be expected. If almost everyone driving around is over the limit after sucking a wine gum it saves officers having to put themselves out to increase the drink-drive conviction rate.

It will not save lives, it will not help to catch persistent and dangerous drink drivers, but no doubt before long we will see a change in the law to the detriment of the rest of us.

The problem is that drink-driving is such an emotive subject like anti-sexism or anti-racism where common sense is everyones last consideration. Anyone who argues against the idea is immediately branded as a supporter of drink driving.

Such people, being beyond the pale, are not worth listening to which leaves the ideological field clear for the stupid to implement their crackpot notions.

Now all we need is one car driver to claim that dropping a lighted cigarette into his lap caused him to lose control of his vehicle and cause an accident, and the wild-eyed puritans will be after a ban on smoking behind the wheel as well.

The controversy over Home Secretary Jack Straws son being accused of supplying cannabis has brought out more pompous claptrap from the media and others.

Once again the issue of whether to legalise cannabis has raised its ugly head with one side claiming that anyone who has ever imbibed cannabis in any quantity or form has immediately turned into a drug-crazed maniac with a £1,000 a day burglary and prostitution-funded crack habit, while the other side claim that sitting on the floor of an adolescent's bedroom for six hours at a time while thinking seriously about your navel fluff and listening to endless Santana records while addressing everybody as Man is a worthwhile and harmless hobby.

Both positions are as daft as each other but those who promote drugs as the cause of crime, while ignoring poverty, social deprivation, the lack of community and the failure of our social ideology to include any more worthwhile individual goal than grabbing as many consumer goods as possible, make less sense than those who are stoned out of the minds most of the time.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.