Banned By The State VIII - Bouncy Castles

Anyone who's had or seen kids at play knows how much they love flying round a bouncy castle for ten minutes. It's energetic, good exercise and fun. So, no one would want to put a stop to that, would they ?

Step forward, Bersted Parish Council in West Sussex, which has just voted to ban all inflatable play equipment from its playing fields. Frightened to death by a High Court ruling last month which found the organisers of a party liable for damages after a child had been injured on a bouncy castle, the council have decided that it's not worth the risk. They reckon it would take four adults to provide the required supervision. Four ? For a bouncy castle ?

This is another of those situations where I just want to shake the world by its shoulders and shout "Get a bloody grip on reality, will you ?" The risks of serious injury in a bouncy castle are tiny. Sure, it can happen. But it's very, very unlikely.

So another harmless, almost entirely risk-free avenue of pleasure is closed down on our children. Presumably the kids of Bersted will go and play in a river or a railway line instead, but that'll be OK because it's not on the Parish Council's watch.

The chairman of the council is quoted as saying "People are saying that we are in a nanny state but as responsible citizens we have to be seen to take what action is necessary." Well, he got one thing right, anyway.

Health & Safety Tossers

I am indebted to a work colleague for bringing my attention to this lamentable tail, in which Health & Safety fascism and fear of litigation has brought an end a harmless tradition in North Yorkshire.

It's the (almost) age-old story bringing to an end to a (genuinely) age-old tradition; Health and Bloody Safety. The cost of insurance and the endless risk assessments.

Obviously the dangers of children and choristers taking part in Pancake Races are there for everyone to see. If it's a race, it might involve people running, and that would never do. And someone might even fall over whilst holding a frying pan, and then where would we be ? And I don't know if you''ve ever been hit in the face by a flying pancake, but, let me tell you, if it happens, Casualty 's your next stop, if not the local crematorium.

What really gets me about the raft of stories where risk aversion comes ahead of everything else is that it would be so easy to fix. All it takes is someone in government to stand up and say "You know all this Health and Safety stuff ? It's all bollocks. From now on we're going to tell our courts to apply some commons sense. And any law that prevents common sense from being applied, we'll repeal". In other words, all it needs is some will, some momentum, some spirit.

Why, oh why, is that so hard to come up with ?

Banned - Sweet throwing

I can't even blame the State for this. A theatre in Norfolk has banned its pantomime cast from throwing sweets into the audience in case someone gets hurt. They're not prepared to fork out the additional insurance premium needed to guard against the risk of someone's kid getting taken out be a low-flying coffee cream.

Actually, if I'd been blogging twelve months ago I could have had a dig at our beloved authorities, because last year Worthing Borough Council banned sweet throwing for fear of sparking food allergies.

I'm not going to descend into a common-sense-defending rage on this one, because I risk just repeating myself from previous articles.

Instead I'm just going to say "OH, FOR GOD'S SAKE !"

Banned By The State VII - Mince Pies

There's something so inevitable about schools banning food made by parents that I thought twice about relating this woeful tale. And then I decided that I would because it says a lot about the status of the individual in Britain today.

The piteous detail is that a school in South Wales has banned pupils from taking home-made mince pies, cakes and biscuits to its Christmas fair. The reason is that the school are worried that someone might get food-poisoning. The Head Teacher is quoted as saying "I don't know what the ingredients are, and there are allergies, and because of things like that we made a decision as a school."

I appreciate that most schools haven't taken this sort of step. Yet. Our children's school held its own Christmas Fair on Saturday, there was a cake stall selling parents' contributions (including, I might add, that of Mrs Womble On Tour, whose cooking is fantastic) and as far as I know everyone's still alive. But it's only a matter of time before this kind of lunacy spreads.

What this says to me is that: a) schools are worried about getting sued; b) parents are deemed as being incapable of making their own risk-based decisions about whether to buy from a cake-stall or not; c) there is a culture of risk elimination (instead of risk management) in many institutions - not just State-run ones, either; d) as a consequence individual responsibility (the fake-mantra of the Blair era that was oft-spoken but always ignored) is further reduced.

There's a ratchet effect in progress here, too. Power is taken out of the hands of individuals because individuals are deemed incapable of arriving at a decision. That means they have less responsibility and less freedom to make their own mistakes and learn their own lessons. So next time someone in authority comes to a view about where decisions lie, they have a further excuse not to grant decision-making powers to individuals. And so it goes on. A bit like growing up in reverse.

I believe that the biggest single thing that could change this is a realisation on the part of our legal system that it's time common sense was applied. If someone eats a mince pie from a school cake stall and then throws up for a couple of days, that's tough. It's not an excuse for a writ. Our legislature and those acting on its behalf has to realise that people are capable of taking their own decisions, and what's more they should be encouraged to do so.

Until that happens, the Nanny State is going to carry on expanding at a terrying rate.