The Weymouth Bluetits will be out in force again this weekend, demanding the reinstatement of two pontoons 300 yards out to sea, which have been scrapped by the council on elf’n’safety grounds.

Last year, the Bluetits – a local swimming club – took to the water to protest about the removal of the rafts.

They had been there since 1939, giving swimmers off the coast of the Dorset resort somewhere to rest, without a single pontoon-related accident or injury.

But the Lib Dem council is standing firm, despite a petition signed by 3,000 people, and is refusing to reinstall the two rafts, after the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) warned they posed ‘a significant risk to the public’.

Apparently they are ‘outside the primary response area’ of lifeguards and therefore the safety of swimmers can’t be guaranteed.

We’re not talking Baywatch here.

Lawyers have advised that ‘even without an incident’ the council could be guilty of a criminal offence under Health and Safety at Work Regulations. As a council officer helpfully explained, in classic bureaucratic Flowerpot Man-speak, the pontoons are: ‘An artificial offshore attraction rather than a natural feature of the sea.’

The fact that there hasn’t been an ‘incident’ in more than 85 years is irrelevant. But rules is rules.

My guess is that the lifeguards would probably be eyeing up the Bluetits in bikinis, anyway, given that temperatures over the Bank Holiday are predicted to hit 80 degrees in old money.

Yet as one of Weymouth’s intrepid Bluetits, Christine James, said: ‘Why can’t the council just put up signs saying “Use the rafts at your own risk”?’

Ask a silly question, Christine. These days we’re all considered too stupid to think for ourselves. Plus, the council’s insurers are refusing to provide cover in the event of a claim for less than £30million. And there’s the rub.

The council is terrified of a vexatious compensation claim by someone tempted by daytime TV ads from one of those spiv Blame Direct law firms I mentioned the other day.

For the same reason, Weymouth council has banned the hire of pedalos. (That’s if the pedalos haven’t been commandeered by the Royal Navy to patrol the Strait of Hormuz.)

Still, at least the Bluetits are allowed to swim in the sea. In North Lincolnshire, they’d be out of luck. So-called ‘wild swimming’ – what we used to call ‘swimming’ – has been banned altogether.

It’s just one of the latest new laws introduced by local councils as part of the punishment culture I’ve been writing about for the past 20 years.

In Torbay, Devon, it’s now a crime to pick up stones from the beach. This week we also learned that foraging for blackberries is a criminal offence in Rugby, Richmond-upon-Thames and Harrow. Why?

When we were kids, we’d go foraging in the fields to bring home the ingredients for my mum’s award-winning blackberry and apple pie. Who the hell decided to make that a crime? These days you’d get a visit from the Old Bill.

Put your pinny on, missus, you’re bleedin’ nicked.

We now live in a country where the authorities daily prove they are unwilling or incapable of tackling real crimes, from shoplifting to street robbery, so they amuse themselves by inventing new ‘offences’ – all enforced by an army of hi-viz, Warden Hodges-style jobsworths.

A few months ago, I wrote about 86-year-old Roy Marsh, from Skegness, fined £250 for spitting out a leaf which blew into his mouth. Two council enforcement officers accused him of spitting on the floor, in breach of a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) and issued him with a statutory penalty notice.

PSPOs were introduced to tackle anti-social behaviour, such as public drunkenness and aggressive cycling in parks and on footpaths. But time and again they are used against easy marks accused of petty offences, real or imagined. We’ve had dog walkers fined for not carrying poo-bags and a woman in South London given a £150 penalty notice for pouring coffee down a drain, after being chased by three – yes three – enforcement officers.

Councils desperate to raise money are criminalising the very people they are supposed to serve. The rot set in between 1997 and 2010, when Labour introduced more than 3,000 new laws, many of them designed simply to extract the maximum cash from ‘offenders’.

Things went from bad to worse in 2014, when the Tory/Lib Dem Coalition brought in PSPOs, a godsend to the assorted Town Hall bullies who get their jollies by throwing their weight around.

The more ridiculous ‘crimes’ have included a blind man fined because his guide dog fouled the pavement, a Scottish man fined for dropping a £10 note by accident, a mother fined because her toddler threw an apple core out of her buggy, a five-year-old girl issued with a £150 penalty for selling lemonade without a licence, and any number of people fined for feeding birds in parks.

It is also a criminal offence to sell a grey squirrel. Who thought it was worth the time, effort and expense to outlaw the sale of squirrels?

Elsewhere, a pet shop owner was fined £1,000 for selling a goldfish to a minor – a 15-year-old boy – after an elaborate sting operation. I could go on, and on, and on.

As I wrote when Roy Marsh had his collar felt for spitting out a leaf: ‘If you give someone any modicum of power, especially if it comes with a uniform such as a hi-viz jacket, they will always, always, always abuse it.

‘We used to live in a free country, where everything was allowed unless specifically prohibited by statute.

‘Over the past 30 years, we have morphed into a virtual dictatorship, in which nothing – up to and including genuine free speech – is permitted unless it is licensed, policed and sanctioned by the State.

‘We have had a succession of control-freak governments hiring hundreds of thousands of people with nothing better to do than dream up exciting new ways of meddling in our lives in order to justify their own pathetic existence.

‘A whole raft of offences has been created, all punishable by huge fines out of all proportion to the assumed “offence”.

‘Britain must by now be about the most regulated, inspected, restricted, nannied, spied-upon country which still pretends to be a democracy on Earth.’

Still, if you can’t quote yourself...

And speaking of ‘rafts’, the Weymouth Bluetits are just one of many millions to fall foul of our pernicious punishment / meets elf’n’safety culture.

I also learned this week that my own council, Enfield in North London, has criminalised ‘catcalling, intentionally shouting or screaming’ in public. I wonder if wandering the streets shouting ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more’ after a few sherberts over the Bank Holiday counts.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll give Weymouth a miss this weekend. I suppose a blackberry and apple pie is out of the question.