I love our nanny state. I bet you do too

WE might say we’d like less regulation but what we’re really objecting to is incompetence. Red tape is the reason most of us will live to old age, writes Claire Harvey.

We might say we’d like less regulation but what we’re really objecting to is incompetence - like the incompetence that led to the Grenfell Tower disaster in London. (Pic: Carl Court/Getty Images)

ONCE, the notion of a building fire was one of the rational fears of life: another thing to keep all our fretful grannies awake at night.

Now, it’s an obscenity. The sight of a flaming tower-block in London — the city that has been devastated by fire a dozen times in its two thousand-year history, most famously in 1666 — does not make sense to our modern eyes. It looks too outlandish to exist outside a bad horror movie.

And that’s because in first-world economies, we all drift through our lives in the total confidence that some unseen hand is keeping us safe.

When we walk across a footbridge, we just expect it to stay up. We step off a kerb onto a zebra crossing in utter confidence that the cars will stop for us. We hold our phones up to our ears till they grow hot and red, assuming someone is making sure they’re not giving us brain tumours.

Some people call that a nanny state.

I call it a civilisation.

The remains of Grenfell Tower. (Pic: AFP/Chris J Ratcliffe)

We don’t know what caused the Grenfell Tower fire, and it will likely be a coronial inquest that finds the answer. But everyone is pointing to the way the building’s recently installed cladding went up “like a matchstick”, according to witnesses, and seemed to spread the fire around the building.

The Times of London has reported the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower used the cheapest available cladding, made of polyethylene, rather than the manufacturer’s fire-resistant product, which would have cost just an estimated 5000 pounds (A$8300) extra to cover the whole building, or about two extra pounds (A$3.35) per square metre.

Firefighters and combustion experts have previously begged UK authorities to mandate the use of fire-resistant cladding on tall buildings, to no avail, according to The Times. Even the famously libertarian United States has tougher fire regulations than London.

This is an instance in which the experts in the field are begging for regulations to save lives. And if “red tape” is competent and appropriate, it’s not an interference. It’s a lifesaver — as long as it’s competent.

Australians might say we’d like less regulation when someone tells us to put the dog back on the leash, or rail against red tape when there’s nowhere to park, but what they’re really objecting to is incompetence.

Nobody wants some plonker from the council telling them what colour to paint the letterbox. What they do want is the council to make sure the drains aren’t wide enough to suck in a toddler, and that there are no used syringes in the playground. Red tape is the reason most of us will live to old age.

I love a nanny state. I bet you do too, even if you whinge about it. Because the truth is that even though we stand around at parties banging on about how oppressed we feel by government, we’re really victims only of ignorance.

Let me prove it to you. I know a 50-year-old woman who doesn’t like wearing a seatbelt, because it might crush her clothes, and because she says it’s uncomfortable. She also likes feeling as though she could be cruising down Highway 51 in 1976, wind in the hair.

The real reason is ignorance. She’s never grieved for someone killed or injured in a car crash. She is the unwitting beneficiary of the huge pile of laws and regulations that make cars and roads safe — like mandatory vehicle inspections, constant roadwork improvements, compulsory child restraints, airbags, seatbelts, headrests, ABS, rigorous licence testing, random breath testing and speed cameras.

Seatbelts save lives, guys. (Pic: iStock)

She appears to have absolutely no idea that each of those developments — each of which was violently objected to by some civil liberties person at the time of its introduction — keep her safe in what is the incredibly dangerous act of travelling at any speed above a gentle trot.

The mandatory wearing of seatbelts is probably the most important of all those changes.

When belts became mandatory, in 1970 and 1971 across all Australian jurisdictions led by Victoria, car crash fatalities were about 30 per 100,000 persons. Within a few years, that figure was slashed to one-third, or about 9 per 100,000 persons — purely as a result of the seatbelt laws. Children under eight were not forced to wear seatbelts under the laws — and they continued dying at the same rate as before.

Here’s the odd bit: passionate anti-seatbelt campaigners declared the belts would cause more injuries than they prevented, and would give drivers a licence to be more reckless, and to go faster.

Some still try to claim that spurious argument, and even use it as a reason to object to other lifesaving safety measures, like cycle helmets, for example. It’s as bogus now as it was in 1970.

One of the heroes of the American Revolution famously declared: “Give me liberty, or give me death”, and his words are a rallying cry for everyone who calls themselves a libertarian, applied to everything from seatbelt laws to the right to hold a backyard burn-off.

Sometimes, I reckon, preventing death is the very best reason to curtail our individual liberties.

Claire Harvey is the deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph.