Did they give their tomorrows for this?

MANY think that the village duck pond derives its name from a bird paddling on its surface which occasionally quacks. Not so. The name comes from a practice seldom used nowadays but which we might be well advised to restore.

Years ago our villages were small living units that few who were born there ever left and where newcomers were rare. A rough lane might run through a village to link it to the next a few miles away or even a main road where the stage coaches ran. So virtually a sealed unit with a church, a pub, a green with free grazing and a pond.

If a member of this self- contained community behaved in such an objectionable manner that he/ she could no longer be tolerated, the offender might be thrown in the pond – given a ducking. Could this old practice be restored?

I have in mind a suitable communal response to the Covid marshal ordering us about as the rule of BoJo’s new Stasi increases and our once- free old country is transformed into East Germany. And what about those fountains in Trafalgar Square? Surely a sprinkling of incompetent ministers or senior civil servants might be introduced to these refreshing water sources?

On a more serious note I have always thought it was axiomatic that a freeborn Britisher could only be imprisoned and deprived of his/ her freedom for breach of statute law. But a statute law has to be passed through our elected Parliament. Yet the utterly illogical rules and regulations pouring down upon us from a probably useless Government have never been near Parliament. They stem from a bureaucrat’s pen- nib, or more likely keyboard.

And who are these newly empowered with the might of the Stasi I recall not so fondly from my year in East Berlin? Are they from the Job Centre or the reservoir of

Picture: GETTY unemployables? Their qualifications? Every humble copper has a couple of those, not to mention months of training and an Oath to the Queen.

Yet we are told these masked and hi- viz “marshals” have the powers to accost, detain, interrogate and fine. No appeal. Just obey, citizen, as in 1984 – the book, not the year. Surely this has to be challenged?

We are not obliged to carry personal ID at all times. So if this old codger refused to give his name, or insisted like the slaves in the film “I am Spartacus”? And if I refuse to pay up, preferring to donate to the NSPCC? Is it mandatory jail? By what act of Parliament? And in what court? And which magistrate wishes to leave his name to a permanent hall of shame by slinging a grandpa who cuddled too many grandchildren into the slammer alongside thugs and brutes?

There seems to be a growing suspicion that many thousands, maybe millions, of Tory voters are making a silent, invisible, vow never to vote Conservative again if this goes on.

Have the knock- kneed wallies round the Cabinet table no idea that we may give them their P45s far faster than they had in mind?

Are the backbenchers, who rather enjoy being MPs but could well not be after the next election, also reduced to spinelessness and dare not make their voices heard?

And all of this in the week after we celebrated the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, when fine young men died so that our old freedoms could never be snatched away from us. How far have we sunk?