Another day, another entirely predictable "health and safety gone mad" rant from the British press:
"DEATH KNELL FOR COMMON SENSE
Big Ben Silenced for FOUR years to protect workers' hearing ... yes, it's all down to Health and Safety!" screamed the Mail in in a front page headline that tried to leap off the page and make your ears bleed with the sheer volume of its righteous indignation.*
How did we arrive at a place where trying to stop people being deafened at work is seen as an outrage against common sense and all that is holy? Fintan O'Toole traces the knee-jerk antipathy back to the grandaddy of folksy conservative common sense...
*Update - the very best headline on the subject came, as you might expect, from the Daily Mash.
Big Ben Silenced for FOUR years to protect workers' hearing ... yes, it's all down to Health and Safety!" screamed the Mail in in a front page headline that tried to leap off the page and make your ears bleed with the sheer volume of its righteous indignation.*
How did we arrive at a place where trying to stop people being deafened at work is seen as an outrage against common sense and all that is holy? Fintan O'Toole traces the knee-jerk antipathy back to the grandaddy of folksy conservative common sense...
...one of the best-known lines delivered by that consummate performer Ronald Reagan as US president, in August 1986 [was]: “I think you all know that I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”If government isn't here to help, what the hell is it for? "Doing mad stuff for no readily apparent reason" seems to be the reply from the children of the Common Sense Revolution.
...It was a clever, insidious sneer at the very idea of public service: to be “here to help” is to be at best a well-meaning bungler. Government does not enable: it interferes. Regulation is redefined as molestation. Public service is a public nuisance. The freedom to live in squalor or to make money from those who do so is the ultimate value...
...If those who seek to govern express derision for government, if they consistently characterise regulation as red tape and action as interference, they destroy the basis of their own authority. Electorates take the hint and aim missiles – Trump, Brexit – at their own institutions: if government is not here to help, why not destroy it?
The right has played with the fire of anarchy, and now both the UK and the US are anarchic states, one in the grip of idiocy, the other of self-destructive fantasy.
*Update - the very best headline on the subject came, as you might expect, from the Daily Mash.
0 comments:
Post a Comment