There have been two stories in the British media this week that help to demonstrate why the New Labour Government is having a problem connecting with the population at large. They are not stories about foreign wars or economic crisis but about the management of private life.

The first saw a 19-year old Canadian woman effectively kicked out of the country because of new visa rules despite having married a Welsh man and being happily settled with him in an apparently stable relationship on British territory.

The second is the announcement that anyone, including parents, who regularly drives children around for social reasons will have to undergo criminal record checks or (in theory though less so in practice) face major fines.

What these stories have in common is an attitude of mind. In a large and complex society, Government has resorted to sledgehammers to crack recalcitrant nuts. Lobbyists against specific abuses have driven Government into solutions that look good on paper but bad in the street.

In these cases, and in many others, the instinct of New Labour progressives when faced with an abuse by a small minority is to create new rules (often begging the question of effective enforcement) that add petty bureaucracy and inconvenience (and costs) to millions.

There are many other examples, low and high. The identity card scheme (in abeyance but far from forgotten) imposes European style social control mechanisms in a forlorn attempt to manage and control massive social security fiddling. Most middle class people just can't see the point.

Sometimes, these approaches are designed to support special interests. New technologies are creating problems for the creative industries so the Government plans to introduce draconian measures on filesharing that could ultimately have coppers bursting in on private homes to arrest teenagers.

If you think this is extreme, observe the Metropolitan Police Art & Antiques Squad's arrest of a teenage artist who dared to challenge the might of Damien Hirst, actually the might of the protectors of the right to print money of fashionable artists needing to preserve value for their patrons.

At other times, the Government follows a different ideological tack. Its Deputy Leader, Harriet Harman, is a hardline old-school feminist who does not like prostitution. Her solution would be to bring in more draconian Swedish-type laws that would outlaw paying for sex.

In her case, just as the change in visa laws is related to forced marriages and the criminal records registration requirements to the risk from paedophiles, the real driver behind Harman's rather potty idea (under British conditions) is the very real problem of sex-trafficking.

If it is not sexual conduct, then it is right behaviour in environmental matters or in late night drinking. Sensible reforms are often made ridiculous with a bridge too far in attempts to control language (implying control of thought) instead of just behaviour.

In Scotland, it would seem a barman cannot volunteer the phrase 'same again' lest that 'nudge' you into that extra drink. The public are treated as mindless zombies. Much of this legislation appears to be guided by a new breed of manipulative cognitive scientists.

Then there is the security agenda which results in increasingly oppressive and patently daft applications of counter-terror legislation in local government. There is not an amateur photographer in the land who is not angered by the increasingly odd behaviour of the police.

Many of the British are beginning to get increasingly irritated by all this interference because it indicates a Government that is weak rather than strong, unable to deal with particular problems through decisive executive action. It can only create blanket rules which it often fails to enforce.

The net effect is a climate of anxiety, fear and inconvenience in which the majority of the population is cowed into avoiding behaviour that they would probably never have considered in the first place, while the really bad people go ever deeper underground where it can be pretended that they do not exist.

There are other irritations. Most of the specific problems that are emerging are the result of globalisation (the easy flow of peoples from other cultures into Britain to meet cheap labour needs) or of community breakdown under free market pressure. But migration and economic interventionism are taboo subjects.

New Labour is trapped by its ideology in two directions - its egalitarian liberal human rights agenda means that rules should apply to everyone equally and its free market agenda fails to permit any  effective and targeted interventionist strategies that can deal with economic root causes.

Not only are there real and vicious abuses in society to deal with but New Labour is also determined to support certain 'creative industrial' interests as part of its competitiveness agenda and to keep its own ideological minorities as happy as possible given its crumbling electoral base.

We are in the position where ordinary British families, generally a-political and best characterised as 'lazy libertarians', are finding that, increasingly, they have to start owning documents and registering to prove they are to be trusted or fear the heavy boot of Plod at every bit of grey area bodging.

They are not only pushed around by uniformed jobsworths (not necessarily the police) when they try to take a snap but they are being forced to snoop on their own kids.

History is repeating itself. In the early 1950s, the Labour Government that created the welfare state and undertook a massive postwar housing programme lost an election to the Conservatives. 

There were many reasons for that defeat but one was that the 'lazy libertarians' decided that they had had enough of 'socialist' regulation and rules and wanted more basic freedoms.

Admittedly a narrow defeat but Labour was slow to understand that many in the electorate saw regulation as a temporary necessity rather than a way of life.

Even though there is now scarcely a socialist bone in New Labour's body (despite the claims of Tory libertarians to whom Roosevelt was a Communist), it has not shaken off its Fabian-derived instinct to manage the population from above through direction and regulation.

There is an element in the New Labour elite that fears HG Wells' projection of his time into a world of Eloi and Morlocks. To Tories like David Davis, council estates are still filled with Disraeli's 'angels in marble' whereas some sour progressives see a seething mob marked by a 'poverty of aspiration'.

Tories have held on to working class votes since Disraeli's time not only through crass nationalism (as Labour people like to claim) but by ensuring a 'laissez-faire' approach to private life. Beer drinkers would naturally gravitate to the centre-right to the degree that the 'temperance' loons took over the left.

In the current Government's case, the ideological predisposition towards social intervention (perhaps accentuated by its refusal to consider economic intervention) is compounded not only by the chaos caused by economic globalisation but by the attempt to Europeanise British culture.

The regulatory frame of mind is normal in parts of Europe. In Germany, it seems accepted that language (as in the criminalisation of holocaust denial) can be a subject for legislation - and this mentality has drifted over into anti-racism legislation and the debate about blasphemy in the UK.

Wherever you look in British public life, in the dying days of what may be the last centre-left administration for a long time, you see a propensity to use the blunt instrument of petty regulation of private life to solve problems that its policy approaches created in the first place.

The gap between the Tories and New Labour will narrow over the coming months as the special interests underpinning the centre-left start to realise what is in store for them - but the general public have accumulated so many petty irritations that a tipping point may have been reached.