Blue Bottoms (Regs part 3)

So; The sloppy drafting of regulations can lead to playing a game called 'unintended consequences'. But for truly idiotic results you need another ingredient.

For better or for worse the UK is part of the European Union, which means we have to have a whole second raft of MPs for the European Parliament (known as MEPs), on salaries which make the boys in the domestic parliament in Westminster look like paupers. It also allows our Prime Minster to attend no end of summits and eat staggeringly expensive lunches. I had a look at some figures released through official channels recently, and the cost of one lunch for one person would feed my family of four, on our normal diet, for a little over ten days.

But I'm getting off the point, quelle surprise. Whatever benefits politicians believe the EU brings to Britain, the people of our country hate it because it seems to exist solely to strangle us in red tape. Every year brings a ragbag of new rules, each more proscriptive, more involved, and in some cases more downright daft than the ones they replace. For instance, did you know we had (until recently) a maximum allowable curvature on bananas offered for sale? True. We have to be protected from bananas which are too bendy at all costs.*

But what really chaps my ass is that the UK is more seriously affected by these regulations than almost any other EU member, and here's why. If the EU passes a regulation, everyone nods wisely and goes home. In sensible countries like France and Italy, they already have a filing cabinet filled to bursting (actually a whole roomful of them) with unactioned regulations – so this one gets shoved to the back of the bottom drawer, to be dealt with after lunch; which is to say, not now. France (for example) regularly gets fined by the EU for noncompliance with various exciting bits of paper. So what? Say the French. It's still cheaper than trying to implement it all. Bof!

In the UK, on the other hand, the MEPs hand the new regs over to Mr Pewty with his pencil moustache. Mr Pewty turns the new regulation into no less than twenty-seven minor amendments to existing regulations, plus three new ones. He lives for moments like these, and before long the amended rules and regulations are couriered out to a small army of sub-Pewtys, and by dawn the next day they're out on the roads visiting farms, armed with their clipboards, ready to make everyone's lives that little bit greyer. Anyone who refuses to comply will be dealt with by the courts, because there's a whole tribe of Pewtys who are employed, on the taxpayers' dollar, to prosecute miscreants for such heinous crimes as displaying prices in pounds and ounces, selling unpasteurised stilton, or feeding vegetable peelings to their chickens.

This is the missing ingredient in the game of unintended consequences. You have to have a slavish devotion to rules and regulations, coupled with a dogmatic and inflexible attitude. Never having had a popular revolution, the British excel in this regard; the Pewtys are, in their own way, like the medieval reeves setting out to impose the will of their feudal masters. Somewhere in the heart of the Brits, there still lies the conviction that whatever we are, we are because our betters allow us to be so. We know our place - and incidentally so do our MPs, who have used their own regulations to keep their heads firmly in the feeding trough all the time they've been beating us with the big rulebook.

So where am I going with all of this? I guess I'm calling for a long overdue British revolution. Not the storming-the-Bastille type of affair (that just wouldn't be cricket), but I think it's time to let our representatives know we want out of all the red tape. Perhaps that's a matter for the ballot box; perhaps it's a matter for gentle civil disobedience.

Or perhaps it's time to paint our bottoms blue and bloody well emigrate.



*This was touted as making packaging less likely to damage the bananas, but was widely accepted as a way of legislating against Caribbean bananas which tend to be smaller and more bendy. In these more enlightened times, however, that policy has been abandoned in favour of punitive tariffs which are a much more efficient way of putting the Caribbean banana farmers out of business.