TOM EATON: What malevolent evil lurks behind the government’s edicts?

The state, I keep reading, has embarked on a programme of social engineering and we should all be worried.

I understand where this anxiety comes from. When a so-called government has retreated from apparent clarity and pragmatism into a laager of secrecy and absurd contradiction from which it rules by decree, it’s difficult not to start seeing its edicts as evidence of a bigger, malevolent project.