Not content with nationalising the banks, Gordon Brown is looking to take control of our most intimate medical details.
He thinks that it's perfectly okay to allow researchers direct access to patient records in order to identify and contact candidates for medical research.
According to The Guardian (which is always right), the government has squeezed this in to the smallprint of the NHS constitution, which makes me wonder if we need an alternative constitution to protect our rights.
Apparently the government believes that having a medical professional involved the selection of research candidates is just slowing down the system.
But not every part of human life benefits from being quicker and more simply done - sometimes more time and thought is required to do things properly.
In this case we would be losing ethical checks and balances on patient confidentiality in order to boost some ill-defined factor of competitiveness in the international research market.
We're back to what Lord Owen described as the Hubris Syndrome, where political leaders stop listening to advice and start believing that they are instinctively right about everything. And we all know how good the government is at looking after our personal data...