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JUST when you thought the health and safety commissariat could surprise us no more, hey presto! Up it comes with a corker.
After much sucking of teeth and stroking of chins, Royal Mail has decreed that road access to the windswept, remote(ish) hamlet of Booze in the Yorkshire Dales is so treacherous that it has been forced to terminate its daily postal delivery, which has operated without incident for more than 60 years. As a result, residents of all 11 homes will now be forced to make an hour-long round trip to collect their mail.
This is not, of course, the summit of K2, but one of thousands of similar steep(ish) single-track roads that criss-cross some of the loveliest countryside in Britain. And yet Royal Mail managers are putting this rough(ish) terrain on a par with Everest, describing conditions as “an accident waiting to happen”.
By coincidence, I can speak with some authority on the matter, because, many Christmases ago, I was hired as a temporary relief postman assigned to a windswept hillside hamlet in Lancashire. Never in any danger of suffering “long-term back injury”, I loved the job. And I have no doubt that the postmen and women who until last week headed daily for Booze loved it, too, as they left the city behind them, filled their nostrils with country air, and prepared heroically to confront such mortal hazards as stray sheep and stones on the highway.
Locals suspect that this health-and-safety malarkey is really an excuse to cut costs, although this is officially denied. So let us take Royal Mail at its word, and ask what might have prompted this excess of caution. The likely answer is timidity: vicarious timidity, on behalf of postal employees despatched to such a hostile environment, allied to fearfulness at the prospect of being sued should an accident occur — as if accidents could not also occur on city streets and suburban roads. (It is strange how the postal service is both solicitous and suspicious of those it employs, but that is another matter.)
What is surely of greater concern is that this timidity virus is not confined to Yorkshire, nor to Royal Mail. It is spreading. The children’s campaigning organisation Play England has just commissioned a report that suggested that activities such as climbing trees and even playing conkers are being discouraged by parents, who are increasingly fearful of accidents. We should not be surprised, therefore, if, in 20 years’ time, those same children grow up to be mystified by risk, defeated by the challenges of life, and hell-bent on seeking compensation after they discover that the world is a far riskier place than they had been brought up to expect.
Although they would deny it, those promoting this learned helplessness have much in common with a particular strain of religious zealotry.
But whereas those of a more conventional religious outlook strive to make the world a better place, the new breed of civic devotee goes several steps further. Not content with making the world better, they labour to make it perfect, erecting signs, imposing regulations, and fining and penalising the otherwise law-abiding for failing to share their vision of the New Jerusalem.
Busily waving in measures to promote their vision of our health and safety, they are also introducing into our national life a regime of infantilisation that is arguably inimical to our traditionally easygoing and tolerant way of doing things.
Of the many tributes paid to the lately departed Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one small observation by his wife Natalya stood out. Speaking about a man who had experienced the cruelty and privation of Stalin’s labour camps, who had been vilified for being the conscience of a nation, and exiled as a traitor for his pursuit of freedom and justice, she merely said: “In general, I should say that Alexander Isaevich lived a difficult but happy life.”
Such magisterial understatement shames our compensation and cottonwool culture, and makes softies of us all.
Trevor Barnes works on Reporting Religion for the BBC World Service.
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