The Sketch: Hooligans are in, liberty is out. That's interconsensualisationism for you

Tony "bendy Bottoms" Blair appeared in The Independent yesterday articulating his new vision for governing the country. It's about equality, egalitarians will be pleased to know. Libertarians will be equally pleased to know it's about liberty. Hooligans will surely be flattered to be included: "If we play football with each other," he says, " ... we are less likely to want to cause harm to each other".

How true that is. When Rangers chanted to Celtic during the Irish hunger strikes: "Could you go a chicken supper, Bobby Sands?", they were making a strong, positive contribution to the cross-cutting, 10-year strategic plan for regenerative community interconsensualisationism. As everybody knows.

In the middle of the Prime Minister's amiable confusion, he did at least say: "The state can sometimes become part of the problem by smothering the enthusiasms of its citizens." What reckless generalising! That's like saying that root vegetables sometimes become part of Anal Annie! Nowhere was this more evident than in the House of Commons yesterday (we've moved on from Anal Annie now). Jacqui Smith droned 350 cubic feet of legislative gobbledegook into the chamber precisely to "smother the enthusiasm" of her citizens.

She had a clutch of amendments to the Adoption and Children Bill, to make it very much more difficult to adopt a child abroad and bring him or her back here. Children brought up in care (no one knows why it's called that) are 60 times more likely to end up in jail than their adopted contemporaries. Their school results are well below par. And, as David Hinchliffe told the House, when you go into a care home the children are all over you, like little bears. They're longing to get out. They're aching to be adopted. Outside the front door, thousands of adults form an orderly queue – they are longing to, aching to adopt the children inside. What could possibly go wrong? The state puts its big arse between the two sets of people; it's incredibly difficult to adopt (Are you fat? Do you go to church more than once a week?) The state prefers children to stay in care rather than be brought up by someone who smokes, or is too rich, or (astonishingly, in our multicultural society) the wrong colour.

These difficulties drive people offshore to find babies in India, Colombia, China. It hasn't occurred to Jacqui Smith – or, at least she has given no indication it's occurred to her – that the situation has been entirely created by the state and that new legislation is not the answer. If adoption in Britain were easier, no one would be looking overseas.

Vincent Cable for the Liberal Democrats told us that, in his experience, such parents found unremitting hostility from social workers, the minister's own office and the immigration service (as if the adopters had found a loophole in the law). We already had, he said, the most restrictive adoption regime in the world.

David Hinchliffe made interesting points, but he asked whether we would allow our own apple-cheeked orphans to be adopted by a richer country simply because we couldn't look after them here. Surely not, we might say: that would be like sending patients to Germany because we couldn't do their hip operations!

SimonCarr75@hotmail.com