I THINK these last seven days have surpassed all others in living memory for laughable announcements from the authorities.

First came the government's proposal to construct 20 new "ecotowns", each with a population of 20,000. Towns where people would be forced to eat healthily, where there would be weighing machines on every street corner and, I quote, "more accessible GPs".

I'm not making this up. But if people in the ecotowns are to be so damned healthy, what will they want with more accessible GPs? Later the same morning a government think-tank advocated abolishing Christmas. The last person to try that was Oliver Cromwell.

Then came another salvo of hysterical gibberish: if we want to be healthy we must "never"

eat bacon, Frankfurters or steak pies; and of course we should have no more drink than the whiff of the barmaid's apron. And we're supposed to believe all this rubbish. As if my butcher on Smithfield were forever trying to murder me with a beef steak.

Every day there's a fresh government announcement, as if propaganda was the same as statesmanship. It reminds me of the relentless statistics of tractor production in Stalin's Russia.

Our politicians ought to read the General Confession in the Prayer Book: "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us".

This is the madness. Instead of clearing up the mess in our schools and hospitals, Government ministers fire relentless propaganda at us about things they cannot possibly alter: solving the obesity pandemic and the pagan fantasy of global warming.

For instance, there is no rational policy for the schools, a policy that might remedy the disgrace that nearly half our children leave after 11 years' full-time "education" unable to read, write and count properly. This is a scandal. Standards of literacy are now actually lower than they were in the 19th Century, before the state made education compulsory. Again, politicians have it in their power to improve the health service, but they do nothing except pour billions into an everdeepening bureaucratic black hole.

Gesture politics. Cowardly politics operated not by politicians who seek the nation's good, but wish only to save their own majorities. Meanwhile, our hospitals remain filthy and thousands die each year from superbugs because so many doctors and nurses don't wash their hands properly.

Next came the proposal that we should all drink only that disgusting UHT milk. Why? Because fresh milk requires too many cows, and cows are farting too much - thus contributing to global warming. I'm not joking.

People are being encouraged not to fly - because that too is said to increase global warming.

But when The British Airline Pilots Association offered to debate this issue with the rent-a-mob Green activists who were spoiling our holidays by cluttering Heathrow, the Greens said they were "too busy". Let me tell you something: Green is the new Red.

There is too much utopian fantasy-mongering, and it's all lies. Neglect of public administration and cynical contempt for the public, the daily insults to the intelligence of the people. Those are the trademarks of this miserable, ruinous government.

I just wish I could point to an alternative - but there's only soft-soap-and-slogans Dave.