THE NANNY FROM HELL?

[Stanley]

THE NANNY FROM HELL?

8 November 2004

I heard a suggestion yesterday that the European Union is considering legislation to restrain dogs travelling in cars because of the dangers to front seat passengers in a collision. Whether this is true or not it raised questions in my mind. On the face of it this is a sensible suggestion. If a vehicle hits an obstruction at any speed, the dog (or anyone or thing unrestrained in the back seat) becomes a projectile travelling at the original speed of the vehicle. Simple dynamics, so why should this cause me any problems?
Quite simply it is because if the legislative body making this suggestion can be described as a nanny, she must be crazy! She has completely lost sight of what most of us describe as common sense and reality. It is quite legal in the UK to buy a car for use on public roads that can achieve an acceleration of nought to death in three seconds with a top speed approaching 200 miles per hour. You are allowed to go ‘free-climbing’ (without safety ropes) any time you want. There is no law against binge-drinking, only concern about the results. Add your own examples. The nanny, if she exists, has no clear idea of risk or priorities.
How can this happen? I believe that the criteria used in assessing risk are directly related to the scale of the vested interest. Anyone who can afford a quarter of a million pounds for a super-car is quite obviously important and shouldn’t be messed with. Free-climbing is sport so that’s all right. Any move to legislate in such a way that it upsets the brewing lobby is going to lead to trouble.
There is another element at work here. Because almost everyone under 50 years old in the Western world has been reared in a world free of war and in an era of antibiotics free from many infections, to mention only two factors, they have no scale against which to assess risk. The more vocal the minority, the more power they have and this is wonderful media fodder. We have had an accident on a level crossing here in the UK and the immediate cry is do away with all level crossings (at a cost of £8 billion). Any cost or safety benefit analysis will immediately show that there are far more effective ways to spend this amount of money on rail safety.
I was in the US when the Twin Towers were destroyed and pointed out to close friends that basically the US had felt the effects of four 1,000 lb bombs. This in a nation that dropped more tonnage of bombs illegally on Cambodia than the total bomb load used in WW2 in Europe. This was not a view that could be voiced indiscriminately in the climate of fear that existed but was nevertheless true and perhaps answered another common question at the time, ‘Why us?’.
My bottom line is that life is a terminal disease, we know not the hour or the manner of our death. This is part of the human condition and it is not possible to legislate against the risk. All that can be done is to educate people to realise that they should hone their own risk management and avoidance skills. I have no problem with this because of my life experience. I also have very little sympathy with people who ignore risk and subsequently get into trouble. If you are prepared to walk a tight rope across Niagara don’t whinge if you fall off.
There is another danger connected with this phenomenon which is only now becoming clear. In the absence of clear principles and well-understood ideology politicians lose the power to take the people with them because they believe in the principles espoused. There is a solution to this, if you can instil fear of a common enemy and promise to fight against this you can gain a following. This focus of fear can be real, we were quite right to be frightened of Hitler, or it can be spurious or intangible, fear of the Russian Bear and eventually Communism was very useful to both the UK and US governments for many years. Fear can weld a nation together just as effectively as high or noble goals.
So, I reckon any moves to stop Jack the Lurcher from sticking his head out of the window to sniff the breeze as we drive down the road are the thin end of a very big wedge. If we can have anger management as a course of study why not risk management? The alternative is to see more and more corrective action by the Nanny from Hell with inevitably disastrous results.

8 November 2004