This is not an exhaustive search, this is just the stories lifted from one newspaper on one random day:
Ten-pack cigarettes will be banned from Friday after an EU directive comes into force this week while packaging will be forced to become bland and standardised.
Then:
The tradition of throwing a mortarboard into the air after graduation has been scrapped by a university because of health and safety concerns, according to a student newspaper.
The University of East Anglia in Norwich said a number of graduates had been hurt by falling hats in recent years, which gave rise to "avoidable injury", according to a statement published in student newspaper The Tab.
And:
Councils could force tends of thousands of takeaways and coffee shops to get rid of all their seating unless they install a toilet, after a judge ruled a lack of facilities in two Gregg's branches was giving them an “unfair advantage”.
A recent High Court case in which Newcastle Council beat Gregg's in a legal battle over whether local branches of the bakery chain should install toilets has set a "precedent", lawyers say, which means other councils can demand take-aways remove tables and chairs if they do not have washrooms.
We are too stupid to know whether we'd like to buy our cancer sticks by the ten or the twenty. After 16 years of education at the hands of the state we are all too stupid still to be able to throw our hat in the air. And we're definitely too stupid to be allowed to sit down and ingest a pastie if we cannot, in the same place, sit down to expel a pastie.
This simply is not how adults rule themselves. It is, however, how those regarded as morons will have rule imposed upon them. The reason it happens this way is, of course, just a little more complex than the total contempt for the intellect of the electorate held by the elected classes.
It is that there are undoubtedly things that government can do, there's also a class of things that must be done. The things that we actually wish government to do are those which only government can do and which also must be done. Unfortunately those are also the difficult things to do: things which severely tax the limited intellectual capacity of those who would rule us. Therefore they don't do them: instead they do the simpler things which do not need to be done by anyone, let alone government. And then they can pat themselves on the back and claim their incomes, expenses and pensions for having ruled us.
What we need is to return government to doing only those things which must be done and which can only be done in that manner. For example, having nationalised the provision of health care it is incumbent upon government to organise health care:
A system of “bribes” which saw GP earnings soar to six figures worsened patient care while increasing death risks for some conditions, a major Lancet study suggests.
Experts said the controversial £1bn-a-year “pay for performance” scheme introduced under Labour constituted an “incredibly expensive experiment” which had failed.
Yes, same newspaper, same random day. Given that they can't actually do the tough stuff they have been hired to do they instead just treat us as morons and do the easy stuff and claim success.
This is not how a nation of adults rules itself. Time for us to return to the days of yore when we were trusted both to make out own mistakes and also to glory in our own successes. We could make this some grand call for an eruption of civil liberty but as an interim stage we'd like to just gently work toward the idea that government treat us not as the morons and children they currently do. Given that we currently pay some £700 billion for the pleasure, we're most certainly all taxed as adults, we don't think this is too much to ask for.