If there's one thing Boris hates, it's red tape. What will he do about it?
The journalist and author Christopher Booker was one of the founders of Private Eye and a columnist on the Sunday Telegraph for many years. Much of Booker’s work was chronicling the damage caused by regulation. A couple of weeks after his death we saw Boris Johnson become our Prime Minister. Is Boris a Bookerite?
Observers will tend to look in vain for complete consistency in Johnson’s record. He is not an ideological politician. But one strong theme from Boris is his exasperation at all the fussy, bossy, busybody red tape that we face in our daily lives. Our new Prime Minister is keen on risk-taking and innovation; bureaucracy can often be restrictive of such endeavours.
The problem gets worse every year. But it is far from new. A generation ago, in 1994, a volume was called The Mad Officials was published, written by Booker and Richard North. It was packed with examples that managed to be simultaneously comic in their absurdity and infuriating for the way in which they detailed the damage caused by arrogance. At the time a lot of new burdens had been imposed to comply with the EU’s Single Market which had come into being a couple of years earlier.
However, Booker does not blame everything on Brussels. While a fervent Eurosceptic he had no hesitation in blaming British officialdom when he sees reason to. Sometimes new rules would be entirely home grown.
On other occasions, there would be “gold plating” – where the interpretation of an EU requirement meant it was made far more onerous than intended or required. Sometimes the points were literally lost in translation.
For instance, we had the implementation of meat hygiene directive 91/494. This required that pigs must be split down the middle before being sold. It caused consternation and the launch of a campaign: “Save the Lincolnshire Chine”. This traditional dish is made from the stuffed forequarters of a whole pig. Slaughterhouses paid out hundreds of thousands of pounds for new mechanical saws.
But it was all a misunderstanding: “The French wording had allowed for carcasses de porc’ to be inspected without being split. But in the English version he word ‘carcasses’ had been given as ‘heads’. Since this made no sense, when Ministry officials in London came to draw up the UK regulations, instead of checking what was meant, they had simply included a requirement for carcasses to be split.”
Building regulations have become ever more cumbersome and intrusive. Booker offers this example concerning staircases: “In south Somerset Sir Antony Jay (one of the co-authors of ‘Yes, Minister’) lives with his wife Jill in a house they have converted from a barn. A local building control officer tells them that a staircase they propose for the first floor is ‘too steep’. To accommodate the stairs at the ‘correct’ angle involves knocking down a wall. Eventually, the Jays ask what would happen if, instead of making the staircase less steep they made it steeper. The official rules that it would then no longer be a ‘stairway’ but a ‘ladder’, and gives his approval.”
It is now much worse. Section K1 of the current building regulations has 17 pages just on “Section 1: Stairs and ladders” setting out in huge detail (in metric) just what staircases (or ladders) the state will allow us to have in our homes.
Or let us consider nursery schools, Booker writes as follows:
“Natalie Blakely runs the Temple Close Nursery School in the Oxfordshire village of Bloxham. Like thousands of other nursery schools and playgroups in the autumn of 1993, she has been visited by social workers who have come to enforce the Department of Health guidelines under the Children Act of 1989. Under the new requirements for staff ratios and space she has had to reduce her number of children from 60 to 40. She has been instructed on ‘how to keep a register, greet parents and organise the first-aid box.’ She has been told to fill in a tiny pond, install new wash basins with thermostatically-controlled hot and cold taps. Her toy box, she was told, did not have enough ‘black dolls or puzzles featuring black children’. Even ‘the toilet rolls (with holders) seem to be subject to the new regulations.. Says Mrs Blakely, ‘This school, which I have run for 25 years, ceases to be mine. I own the property only. I am emasculated. Eventually, I will close. ‘ ”
The Children Act of 1989 is still on the statute book – while The Childcare Act of 2006 has added to the regulatory madness.
Apart from the EU another factor that causes red tape to grow is that we have self financed regulatory agency responsible for several industries. Rather than being conducted by Government Departments – with civil service salaries paid for by taxation – each agency could charge fees for compulsory licensing or registration. “It could impose penalties fro non-compliance, ranging from fines to closure, or the withdrawal of licences, which had the same effect,” said Booker. “And it could often act as its own arbiter, in that there was no appeal on law against its decisions.”
The officials loved the new arrangement: “Quite apart from the sheer enjoyment of bureaucratic empire -building and the exercise of power, they could look forward to remarkable increases in their salaries.”
While politicians would talk about “deregulation” the reality would be the opposite. “It seemed that most politicians had lost capacity for
independent thought,” Booker wrote. “They had passed entirely into the hands of their officials.”
All this has been done so brazenly. Enoch Powell once remarked: “Tyranny comes not silently, like a thief in the night. But openly and in broad daylight boldly declaring its intent.”
Given this long depressing saga, it would be naive to imagine that Brexit will be a panacea. All it will mean that is that our elected representatives will no longer have a convenient excuse. Then we shall see if Boris Johnson the Prime Minister has anything in common with Boris Johnson, the Telegraph columnist. After all those years of indignation at affronts to freedom and justice we shall see what he will do about it. Should he be true to himself there is plenty to hack away at. Might it be that his old colleague Booker could get his revenge from beyond the grave on the ranks of officialdom which defeated him in life?
