The privilege of red tape

Like so many in the UK today, I am reflecting on the horror of the fire at Grenfell Tower yesterday. The pictures of the inferno will stay with me for the rest of my life. I cannot begin to imagine the devastating effect on those who saw or experienced the horror first hand.

I am in no position to add to the speculation around the contributing factors. But I have observed a theme in the questions of others - questions surrounding the adequacy and enforcement of regulatory frameworks, particularly with regard to building regulations and fire-safety provisions.

This observation reminds me that regulations and laws are on the whole a good thing, and that ideological desires to reduce red-tape are often misguided. And this brings me right back to Brexit. Because in December 2016, the Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, evangelising for Brexit, said that regulations that were “good enough for India” could be good enough for the UK – arguing that the UK could go “a very long way” to rolling back high EU standards.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-safety-standards-workers-rights-jacob-rees-mogg-a7459336.html

He was talking about safety regulations relating to imported products to the UK after Brexit, but the mindset is relevant. It is the prevailing obsession of many currently in The Conservative Party to want to slash regulations – Liam Fox for example is eager to reduce regulations around workers' rights as soon as we are out of the EU.

The questions around Grenfell Tower include concerns about the failure to regulate to provide sprinklers in tower blocks; there are reports of malfunctioning saftey equipment such as fire and smoke-alarms and emergency lighting which, if true, would be in breach of existing legislation; doubts are being raised about the suitability of the materials used in building works and exterior cladding, which may or may not turn out to be adequate under current legislation. In time, we will get answers no doubt. But in the meantime, I am reminded that human instinct is so often to see what we can “get away with”; to recognise this is to understand why we need regulation. This is nothing new, and it's not unique to the Tories. It is part of the human condition and we are all guilty at times of making bad decisions. Two thousand years ago, St Paul said: “I don't understand what I do. I don't do what I want, you see, but I do what I hate.”

I suggest therefore that red-tape, far from being a hindrance, is in fact a privilege of modern society. We need regulation to protect us from ourselves and each other. The EU has brought forward a plethora of laws over several decades, but it is a strange thing indeed that we have been taught by our media to resent this. These laws are intended for our good, to protect the ordinary citizen from the landlord, employer, politician and neighbour.

How many times has our government been guilty of acting unlawfully or unfairly against ordinary people? Be it disability rights, fit-for-work decisions, refugee safety, air-quality etc. Even the early attempt to initiate Article 50 itself involved by-passing the Sovereignty of Parliament. We need laws to keep us all safe and to hold some power of check over the government of the day. EU regulation has, on the whole, tried to hold all member governments to the same high standards.

If we do indeed go ahead with Brexit, who will guarantee that our national government won't embark on a huge-scale dumping of our rights in all areas of our lives?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Brexit Apathy

“The death of democracy...will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.” These words of Robert M Hutchins seem rather pertinent to our current situation. Every day I ask myself again whether it's time to “let it go” and accept Brexit. And every time I ask that question, two big issues rise up to block the way. The first is the unbelievably cavalier way in which the individuals most affected by this are being treated – the EU nationals who live in the UK and the UK nationals who live in other EU countries. We have, as the saying goes, thrown them under a bus. And when you consider the stir caused this week by CCTV footage of a London jogger doing exactly that to a woman on the pavement, it brings home what a shocking analogy it is. As long as the politicians insist on playing games of chess with real peoples' lives, there will be millions of us who dig in our heels and say “unacceptable”. The second big stumbling block to accepting the out...
Read more

Windrush - twig or branch?

I can't stop thinking about the so-called Windrush scandal. I say so-called, because I think there's a danger that we have got hold of the wrong end of the stick if this is 'only' about the Windrush generation. Or rather, we have grabbed firmly on to the twig, but if we run with that, it will snap away, leaving the main branch, the bigger point, unmoved. Don't get me wrong - the Windrush scandal is certainly shocking. The way individuals have been treated correlates with my definition of criminal. But these individual cases are but twigs from a thicker branch of systemic hostility to "the other". If we allow ourselves to be focused on individual cases, we allow Theresa May and the Government and, in fact, ourselves, off the hook. If the concern is that person A is deported in error, an apology can be made, decisions reversed and even, potentially, compensation made. And there the story dies, with no hint of "lessons having been lear...
Read more

Brexit - Secret Option Number Three

There's talk of riots if Brexit doesn't go ahead. It's hard to know whether this is a serious possibility – a proposed protest at the Supreme Court in December was hastily cancelled at the last minute when barely a few dozen showed any interest. But let's just for a moment assume it is a real and credible possibility. The prevailing narrative over-simplifies the choice – implement the result of the referendum or don't. Implement it and cause certain impoverishment to our nation. Ignore it, and risk riots and undermining the cause of democracy. But why is our vision so narrow? What if there is a secret option number three? There are five Ws that help us get to the bottom of a story – What? When? Who? Where? And Why? The first four are essentially fact-based and are in themselves often rather dull. They are answered easily enough with regard to the referendum result. The interesting question is the last one – “why”. And over a year later, we are still no clearer...
Read more