Rules, Regulations & Law

My exercise of choice is lane swimming. I go 3 - 4 times a week for 30 minutes & swim about half a mile doing back crawl. There are conventions of how lane swimmers should behave, to do with safety & consideration for others. If there are several people in a lane it is important that these are observed to avoid swimmers crashing into eachother. I have to be especially careful because obviously I can't see where I'm going. If others don't observe the rules I'm in danger of a collision, which has happened occasionally.

My point is that rules & regulations are there for a reason, to enable us all to live together as harmoniously as possible. Societies are huge, complex systems. They cannot be a self indulgent "free for all". Everyone has to be prepared to conform to some extent. The alternative is chaos & harm.

So called democracies have a legislative framework that enables law to be enforced and operate in daily life, usually created by government ministers. The really important word in that sentence is "enforced". There is no point in having rules, regulations & law if they are just written & not enforced by a body with oversight & the power to impose sanctions.

My feeling is that in the UK & much of the world we have reached the point where norms of behaviour & the rules that govern them are not being complied with. Worse still oversight bodies or even legislators are not acting against serious breeches of accepted behaviour. 

This "laissez faire" attitude permeates from the ground upwards to the very top. The current debacle with the Water industry, the handling of the Covid epidemic, the Post Office Horizon scandal to name just 3. All have gone on for years. All have been shocking in the levels of incompetence & deception that have been revealed. 

Yet the Water industry is supposed to be overseen by Ofwat. Margaret Thatcher's government privatised England's water companies in 1989. The combined debt of the industry was £60.3 billlion in 2023.

Covid cost between £310 - 410 billion, largely due to the lack of preparedness for a pandemic everyone knew was coming. Public Health England had oversight, but were constrained by poor political decision making.

The Post Office is a public corporation of the Department for Business & Trade. There is supposedly a Post Office Redress Service, but I haven't heard anything whatsoever about them in the current enquiry. During the time of the scandal there were 11 government ministers in charge. Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office prosecuted 736 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses—an average of one a week. The cost of this will be in the billions.

"Headless chickens" are the words that come to mind. But it is worse than that. People in charge have routinely lied to protect themselves or their organisations. Enforcement simply did not exist. Innocent people have had their lives destroyed utterly & even died as a result. The tax payer - you & me are paying & will continue to pay the bill for this profligate incompetence. 

We deserve so much better. We all need to think very carefully about how we use our vote in the coming elections.