Which laws do you want to scrap? ‘Your Freedom’ is Nick Clegg’s new Government website on which you can tell the Government which laws you would like to repeal, which civil liberties you’d like to restore, and which onerous regulations you’d like to scrap.

Something called the Freedom Bill later this year will, apparently, sweep away a whole pot pourri of unnecessary or burdensome controls over what people can and can’t do.

Is it long overdue common sense or just another gimmick? I’ll reserve judgment until I see the Bill – whatever else, it promises to be more fun than the run-of-the-mill stodge they usually serve up as new legislation!

They received 2,205 ideas in the first day, nearly 7,500 comments and 18,000 ‘votes’. On a quick look through, a lot of the ideas actually seem to be for more new laws or changes rather than repeal – lowering the pub drinking age to 16, compulsory voting, linking parenting classes to child benefit, teaching macroeconomics to high school students – the list is endless! There are lots of good ideas for repeals, too, along with some inevitable entries such as the Hunting Act and lots of stuff on cannabis.

I could add lots of top-down controls over local councils, but they are getting their own special treatment – a Decentralisation Bill which promises to return power to local level.

I suspect it may instead concentrate even more power at some amorphous sub-regional or ‘city region’ level. In our case, that may mean another round of bureaucratic power-grabbing by Lancashire County Council.

But there is hope that it might do away with at least some of the top-down nonsense we have to cope with. Councils are at present wasting time and money working out detailed Petition Schemes which have to cover exactly how they will deal with petitions they receive.

All this is set out in six full pages of legislation in the so-called Local Democracy Act that we had to pass last year. Plus pages of details regulations.

If we can get rid of that kind of nonsense in this coming autumn, we will perform a service to everyone.