Newsround

Most of the time my writing for this blog is fairly serious, but occasionally my peculiar sense of humour just demands expression. Right now we're in the midst of a mini heat-wave, and it's too hot for writing seriously…

Here in the UK, Chancellor Gordon Brown is about to take over the Prime Minister's job from Tony Blair without a single vote being cast. Gordon's main claim to fame are his "stealth taxes" - in case you don't know about stealth tax the principle is the same as the stealth bomber: it hits you before you have a chance to see it coming. With £3BN a year disappearing from government revenues in "carousel fraud" Gordon will have a lot of ground to make up, so stealth tax watchers are expecting him to start taxing hitherto unthinkable areas of private life.

It is rumoured that officers at HM Revenue and Customs are considering whether spanking could be treated as a "taxable supply" for the purposes of Value Added Tax. There are considerable practical difficulties with this, not the least being the problem of drafting a legally-enforceable definition of spanking, and allocating a monetary value to it. Under the proposed new rules currently being considered in Whitehall, all Doms who deliver spankings with a total value above the current UK VAT threshold of £61,000 in one tax year would have to register for VAT, collect and account for the tax at a rate of 17.5%, even if no money actually changed hands. As to putting a price on a spanking it is proposed that a team of researchers will be recruited to visit appropriate premises to determine an "Average Spanking Market Value".

It is one thing to propose a new tax, but another thing to collect it, as Gordon well knows. However as a member of a government that has introduced unprecedented levels of state control into the lives of it's citizens, Gordon will have several options available to him. He has not ruled out CCTV in every bedroom, but another possibility being explored is compulsory registration. Under such a scheme a state controlled register would be compiled, with entry to the register being administered by a governing body. Only registered Doms in possession of a valid Disciplinarian Identity Card (DIC) would be allowed to spank.

There is reported to be fierce competition between government departments for control of such a register - first to bid were the Department for Culture, Media and Sport on the grounds that D/s is both part of our cultural heritage and a sport. However this is contested by the Department of Health, who point to the stress-relieving effects of spanking as evidence that it should be treated as a health matter, and administered by properly qualified professionals. Many health professions are controlled by self-regulating bodies, examples being the Royal College of Nurses, Royal College of Midwives and Royal College of Psychiatrists. The Health Department is therefore proposing a new organisation to administer the profession, to be called the Royal College of Disciplinarians.

This bid by the medical profession is strongly contested by the Department for Education and Skills, who are claim their own historical precedents for control of the field. The disadvantage for practitioners of being under the auspices of the DfE would be the bureaucracy involved. Educational establishments have to submit to regular inspections by Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education), and as any teacher knows, the paperwork involved in an Ofsted inspection is enough to make on lose the will to live.

With all this uncertainty in the UK it's good to know that it's business as usual in Brussels. EuroCane, the organisation responsible for the standardisation of disciplinary implements in Europe, has run out of funds, having spent all of its considerable budget allocation on a 16 storey marble-floored office building. The British delegation is threatening to veto an attempt by the Italians to reduce the traditional six of the best to five. Meanwhile French martinet manufacturers are demanding action to prevent their markets from being eroded by cheap imitation implements from the Far East.