MISSING DISCS FOR THE GOVERNMENT, SANDWICHES FOR ME

I was reminded this week, as scandal after scandal rocked the leaky boat of government, of a wonderful sketch written by Peter Cook and performed as part of the ‘Pete and Dud’ series. Peter is explaining, or trying to explain, acupuncture to his dirty rain-coated colleague. “Let’s say you’ve got a pain in your head,” says Peter. “Well this acupuncturist comes along and sticks a needle in your arm, so you forget about the pain in your head and worry instead about the pain in your arm. So the acupuncturist then sticks a needle in your bum – so you forget about the pain in your arm and concentrate on the new pain.

“In the bum,” says Dud. “In the bum,” says Peter – or words anyway to that effect. And with it he creates the splendid illusion of the acupuncturist breathlessly chasing all over the body sticking needles hither and thither to keep one step ahead of the developing pain.

This prompted my tongue to venture deep into my cheek and suggest that maybe the reason child benefit discs went missing was to take our minds of Northern Rock. Then the latest funding scandal arose to take our minds of the missing discs. The only problem is that sooner or later the acupuncturist is bound to run out of needles, leaving a bruised and battered patient unable to sit down behind him. Sooner or later the government equally will run out of scandals, too, I suppose.

As my connections with Northern Rock are limited to it being Younger Daughter’s mortgage provider of choice and as I have long given up claiming child benefit, I am reasonably well insulated from the chaos going on around me, though I am checking my bank account just in case someone has tried to use my name to donate thousands of pounds to the Labour party.

Al the same, I do find myself wanting to shout aaaahhhh! at the seeming incompetence of it all. I want to tear my hair and grind my teeth, particularly over the case of the missing discs, which just seems somehow typical of the culture of the bureaucratic institutions these days.

More and more it seems as though these institutions – like Revenue and Customs - that are meant to serve us, have become instead our masters. They make regulations for our lives, which somehow don’t quite seem to apply to them, but which make me feel like some inmate in an institution for the senile. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

This week I fund myself in a government building, ‘assisting’ at a UN event, part of the run-up to World Aids Day on 1 December. As the timing of the event coincided with lunch, sandwiches had been provided. Very thoughtful, I thought.

However, we were downstairs and the sandwiches were upstairs. Can we not move the sandwiches downstairs, we ventured? No, came the equally inevitable answer. There seemed no good reason other than bloody mindedness unless it was a desire to increase the nation’s fitness by making everybody troop unnecessarily up and downstairs. Aaaaahhhh!

No doubt there was a reason, perhaps something to do with Health and Safety – a sandwich on the stairs could, after all, trigger a fall and the resulting compensation would need to be on the scale of a government grant.

But then I wondered if the sandwiches had perhaps not been provided from generosity and thoughtfulness, but had been themselves part of another Health and Safety in public offices decree? Could we all have sued otherwise for negligence of our rumbling stomachs?

Everything now seems regulated. People can no longer ‘do’ simple things that seem to them sensible at the time, everything has to be done according to the book, or according to advice. How often have you heard people say when turning down a request ‘there’s no precedent for that’ as if doing something for the first time was a sin against the Almighty.

When I grew up the quality most appreciated by those in authority over us was initiative, sometimes called resourcefulness or ‘nous.’ For the boys, I seem to remember, it was showing OLQs - ‘Officer Like Qualities,’ but whatever you called it, it always boiled down to the same thing, which was: if the unexpected happens, as it always does, can you cope?

Someone who can act on their own initiative doesn’t need regulation – they make their own regulations as they go along and the world moves rather faster as a result. That is anyway the world into which I grew up in which you coped as best you could and doing something differently was at least a sign that some grey matter was functioning. Which is not something that could be said in the case of the hapless individual who put the 25 million personal details unregistered into the post. It may have been novel, but it was not coping.