The Rotten State of Britain

the presence of extinguishers makes residents more likely to try to put a fire out by themselves, rather than see their property go up in flames while they wait for the experts to arrive.

South-West Trains had to remove 28 trains because lettering on their station-indicator boards was only 32mm high, against a standard of 35mm. That of course caused more overcrowding on the other trains.

Meanwhile, organizers of the annual Christmas Party in the village hall at Embsay, near Skipton, were told that they needed a full risk assessment, and would have to put nut allergy warnings on the mince pies.

better rail safety was needed – specifically, the £3.5 billion European Rail Traffic Management System, which prevents trains going through red signals. In reality, that would save just one life every 16 months, and it would slow down the network to such an extent that more people would decide to drive instead, leading to dozens more deaths on the roads. But that’s how regulation is made.

regulation on businesses rose by more than £10 billion over the year before, to a staggering £76.8 billion.

Each year, the state requires us to fill out more than a billion forms. And each year, the government passes twenty or more major laws. It also approves around 3,500 regulations, amounting to around 75,000 pages of rules, with another 25,000 pages of explanation.

1973, but they started to be enforced only when tighter legislation was introduced in 2000. That led to the first ‘metric martyr’ prosecution, of Steve Thoburn, a Sunderland market trader. His case, and three others, went to the Court of Appeal, where the convictions were upheld.

And the mistakes continue. In the year to August 2009 alone, the CRB wrongly reported some 1,570 people as criminals when they were innocent, or as guilty of a more serious offence than they actually committed, or (most worrying) as having a clean record when in fact they did not.

That’s the same sort of confusion that inconvenienced hundreds of travellers in January 2005, when America turned back a BA flight to New York in mid-Atlantic, when they discovered that one of the passengers’ name matched that of a terrorist suspect (though of course, it was a mere coincidence).

The Police Inspectorate believes that more than a fifth of the entries in the Police National Computer contain errors. Some 13,000 people turned out to be wrongly labelled as criminals by the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB), causing many to lose their jobs. The entry on Amanda Hodgson, 36, a law-abiding mother who applied to be a welfare assistant at her local primary school, said she was a heroin addict with convictions for assault and battery going back eighteen years.