This Is Jersey

I HAVE to admit to being a bit of a collector.

As a boy, I certainly did stamps and Dinky Toys. I never got as far as train spotting, but did indulge in the next best thing – buses. Registration numbers, PSV and char-a-banc plates, there wasn’t a green and cream JMT bus that escaped my youthful scrutiny.

If you think that’s sad, I’ve now graduated to ‘rules’ – all those silly regulations being dreamed up by the intellectually challenged and risk averse to sanitise and depress anyone trying to enjoy themselves or show individuality.

You know the sort of thing: you want to let your child play in your two-inch deep back garden plastic paddling pool, so you have to employ a lifeguard. And because this silliness is proliferating, my album is getting very full.

Every day comes another example of PC negativity, delivered in po-faced dictats, riven with gobbledygook thinking and spurious rationale. Soft toys ordered off the radiators of dustcarts in case kiddies run into the street to ‘liberate’ them. Woe betide the nation’s cabbies if they fix paper poppies to their taxis in November. Out will come the rule warriors to clip them off, in case junkies lunge forth to grab them to refine into a fix.

The trouble is you don’t know where the next restriction is going to be lobbed from. Lovers of the culinary delicacy, Peking duck, will rue the latest ruling from Brussels banning its preparation in Europe’s Chinese restaurants because the traditional cooking pots don’t meet EU regulations! Of course there’s always a plausible reason advanced to justify the ruling. You now can’t have your wedding pics taken in a registry office in case the camera catches a glimpse of the wedding register – that’s data protection. On the other hand, if you’re a pagan, you have to be allowed to keep your favourite bundle of sticks and twigs if you’re banged up in jail – that’s your human right.

Regardless of their merit, once passed, such rules become writ in stone. I can’t think of a more infuriating response from officialdom than: ‘I know it doesn’t make sense, Sir, but those are the rules.’ Can there be any justification for the rule which demanded that legally caught – increasingly scarce – white fish should be dumped dead into the North Sea to satisfy EU fishing quotas? The limits were in fact designed to preserve the stocks not decimate them.

The net effect is that these fish are not consumed – except by gulls, who should be doing their own fishing anyway, and not robbing local dustbins. And what happens? In order to satisfy the market, the same fishermen have to return to the sea to cast their nets among the diminishing supplies to get more! How crazy is that?

Of course, when it comes to an individual’s civil and personal liberty and safety – particularly in relation to children and the vulnerable, it is vital that they are protected with robust and sensible mechanisms.

How sad then to find these interpreted with all the oppressive zealotry which assumes worst-case motive. The implication that one’s fellow man is judged evil and seedy until proven innocent is grossly insulting.

While it’s perfectly acceptable that anyone who professionally goes within 100 yards of children – teachers, ice-cream sellers etc – should be formally approved, the scope of the serial legislator knows no bounds.

The latest outrage has to be the story of a mother prevented from accompanying her disabled son in a council taxi, because she had not been police-checked! Not surprisingly, the result has been an increasing reluctance by decent well-meaning volunteers to come forward. Who’d dare point a camera these days at the charming little ‘wheelbarrow’ load of toddlers on their daily care-free trundle to play-group, across Royal Square? Even Britain’s self-appointed ‘super-nanny’, Esther Rantzen, has herself acknowledged the negative effects of the tyranny unleashed by the child tsars.

Excessive indulgence in 21st century comfort living may have dulled our entrepreneurial ‘get-up and go’, but it hasn’t completely neutered our basic and noble survival instincts. Nevertheless the passion for telling others how to manage their lives is spreading like wild fire. It’s deeply entrenched in the media.

More trenchant than paternalistic advice, you now have a TV programme entitled: ‘What not to wear’– I ask you, who are these dictators? And the worst thing is that the ‘victims’ willingly succumb to this tyranny with the reluctance of driven sheep! There are prescriptive magazine articles on parenting – how to bath a baby etc, as if no previous generation had existed. Frankly, if that knowledge had not been universal, they wouldn’t be in a position to offer it now, would they? Interestingly enough, individuals in the Third World make such choices successfully and unhindered every day.

I suppose the greatest hope is that despite the huge structures eagerly put in place to hold it up, all this silly PC-ism will implode. Don’t hold your breath, at least in the short term. The problem is, taken too far, all this misguided pussy-footing behaviour is dangerous.

While it’s easy to mock the excesses of the PC warriors, there is little doubt their activities can sow the seeds of resentment which could potentially back-fire and violently destroy the very homogenised social porridge the PCs are blindly trying to create.

So, given this current institutional Anglo-Saxon obsession, it’s ironic that it’s the French – not traditionally renowned for delicacy in such matters – who’ve been preventing UK Customs inspectors using x-rays to probe for illegal immigrants hiding in lorries crossing the Channel, lest it breaches their human rights.
A case of ‘Qui prend le Michel maintenant, eh?’

Article posted on 23rd July, 2008 - 3.00pm