big bad government

Simon Jenkins is a complaining about the bloated bureacracy of the health and safety nazis ruining everything they touch in an impossible quest to remove all risk from everything everywhere.

The HSE is like the Child Support Agency, the Criminal Records Bureau and the Rural Payments Agency, a state body whose introverted culture has polluted its own reason. Why should no seats be allowed at open-air concerts? Why should swimming-pool diving boards be banned? Why should people not walk under old trees? Can people never be allowed to make such decisions for themselves?

This is the product not just of bad government but of too much government, addicted to bossiness, crazed by control, and careless of the misery it brings to good citizens trying to help others. It is mad, and nobody seems able to stop it.

This is what always happens when the govenment tries to regulate what is unregulatable. But it won't stop them trying or the big govenment fanatics from claiming that the only problem is not enough government meddling rather than too much of it. But even on the Guardian there where practically nobody willing to stand up for the state, perhaps there is hope for them yet.