Sometimes I wonder about this government of ours. I wish they’d make their minds up and stop contradicting what they say with what they do.

Take child car-seats for instance . . . remember the fuss over the introduction of the new safety rules on carrying kids in cars?

Suddenly, it wasn’t enough to trust parents to ensure the safety of their own children. At a time when our nation was beginning to face some big scary problems, like war and social breakdown and ordinary folk beginning to feel the financial pinch, the Great and the Good decided to introduce measures forcing anyone who may ever need to transport children, to go out and buy an expensive car-seat for each of them.

I can see where they were coming from, we all can, but the reality is just another ill-thought-out decision from the nanny state we are becoming.

We all want children to be safe at all times, but rules like this are the very thing responsible for shrinking kids’ experiences in life even further, rolling them in cotton wool until they can barely feel anything at all.

I don’t have any offspring but my friends and family do and there are times I’d like to play the Auntie and take them out for the day. There are times I’d like to ease the load on their parents by picking them up from school or ferrying them to activities. But I can’t do any of these things because I don’t have a suitable range of car-seats, nor the ability to fit and re-fit them, every five minutes.

And by the time I’ve gone and fetched the car-seat from mum or dad, had them fit it into my car, taken the child wherever it’s going and home and then organised the unfitting and re-fitting back into mums car, I’ve lost the will to live . . . and so have they.

Perhaps it’s just another sneaky way of encouraging us all to use public transport. That would make sense if it weren’t for the fact that there are no car-seats on buses or trains.

There are no seat-belts, no visible safety measures at all save – you guessed it – the common sense of parents. Just nice, bouncy seats for the little whippersnappers to jump about on while they look out of the windows!

So if we can be trusted to keep kids safe on public transport, why not in our own cars?

See what I mean about contradiction? A little consistency would be nice about now…