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SUNDAY JANUARY 27 2002

John Humphrys: Banning other people’s fun can be bad for you

Flying long distances is a miserable business. The one thing that makes it almost bearable is the pleasant, slightly woozy feeling that you get when you drink a glass of wine at 30,000ft. Well, enjoy it while it lasts. They are thinking of banning it.
A conference on the health risks of international travel at the Royal Society of Medicine agreed that we need protecting from ourselves. One reason is that boozing in the air increases the risk of deep vein thrombosis, which is triggered by blood clots. However, the main reason is that there has, apparently, been a big increase in the number of so-called “air-rage” incidents over the past few years.
One professor told the conference about research which suggests that as many as nine in 10 of us feel some anxiety about flying. If it is fuelled by alcohol that anxiety “could easily become uncontrollable rage”. Note the weasel words. “As many as” is just another way of saying “We don’t know, but here’s our guess”. Anxiety “could” become uncontrollable rage. Sure, and it could also make you sit rigid in your seat for the next eight hours because you’re afraid of tilting the plane if you get up and move.
Anyway, the doctors agreed that there are risks and the authorities are getting worried. Balpa, the airline pilots’ association, says the best thing to do is to stop drunken passengers getting on the plane in the first place, but common sense seldom prevails when the experts pitch in with their grave warnings. So stand by for a ban on booze.
This is madness, and I say that as someone who was once an enthusiastic banner. Boxing? Ban it. Foxhunting? Ban it. Ghetto blasters? Ban them. Personal freedoms? Ah, there’s the rub.
In some ways it’s odd to be worrying about freedom when we live in a far more tolerant society than the one in which I was brought up after the war. Think of the three things that so many of us enjoy so much: sex, booze and shopping.
If you were a male homosexual, the law made it illegal to sleep with your boyfriend. If you wanted a drink in the afternoon or on Sundays, you’d have to join some seedy club. And if you wanted to go shopping on Sundays, about the only things you could buy were a loaf of bread and the newspapers at the corner shop.
Most of those laws have been dumped and more are on the way. The pubs will soon be open round the clock (although it is taking an inordinately long time to get round to it) and we’ll soon be able to get married in the open air if the mood takes us. And why not? Yet there is still this sense that we are increasingly prevented from doing more and more of the things we want to do. One reason is what you might call “soft” bans. There are so many regulations and requirements if you want to do something that it often becomes such an effort that you just give up. We had an example of that this past week.
Let’s say you want to organise a street party to celebrate the Queen’s golden jubilee. You will need the Events Safety Guide published by the Health and Safety Executive. After reading its 35 pages and contemplating all the requirements and expenses involved, most mere mortals will probably say: “Sod it. I’ll wait another 50 years.”
It’s partly our fault and partly the fault of successive governments. We’ve cottoned on to the fact that if something happens to us we can always blame someone else and then claim for compensation. There’s always a risk. What if someone trips over a trestle holding up the table at the street party? You’ll need to be insured — just in case.
Guess who picks up the bill for that. And you can’t just close the street with a bit of tape. You need planning permission — and that costs.
As for your political leaders, they’re always under pressure to “do something” to make our lives better and safer. Usually what they do is bung on a few more regulations. Every government says it will cut red tape. Every governments adds to it. Last year Whitehall alone found another 4,000 new regulations — not so much a bonfire of red tape, more of a mountain.
Another reason why we feel less free is our old friend political correctness. We have to watch our language these days. We can’t go around making jokes about racial minorities and we must know the difference between “the disabled” and “the differently abled”. Some of it is nonsense; most of it is right and proper. But it all contributes to the climate of feeling less free.
Then there is the natural inclination to disapprove in general. H L Mencken once defined a puritan as one “who fears that someone, somewhere, is enjoying himself”. There’s a bit of that in most of us.
I loathe mobile telephones. When I am forced to listen to everyone else chattering away on a train I want the phones banned — or possibly the users taken off the train at the next station and shot as an example to others. It is the worst sort of antisocial behaviour — which means, of course, anything that I personally find offensive.
Here’s the nub of it. It’s always someone else’s behaviour that we want to curb. I want to ban all young people from drinking their cans of disgusting lager in my town square. But just let anyone interfere with my right to enjoy a nice bottle of chilled chardonnay with my picnic in the local park.
Social pressure can be an effective tool for changing behaviour. There is scarcely a dog walker in my park who doesn’t scurry after the pooch when it makes a deposit on the grass, wrap up the mess in a plastic bag and dump it in the nearest bin. There are no signs telling them to do it, but many pairs of eyes watching in case they don’t.
Yet some things must be banned. The most vulnerable must be protected. The difficulty arises when we start banning things not in order to protect others who might be harmed but to protect us from ourselves.
Try this one for size. A friend who lives in north London went for a long walk in the icy weather during the new year that meant cutting through a local park. He found the gates locked and a notice saying the park was closed and would remain so until the weather warmed up. He could not use his park because he might injure himself if he slipped on the path. So he was banned.
It might be a good idea to look at all our “banning” laws and throw out those which don’t satisfy the classic liberal principle of allowing us to do what we want to do unless it hurts someone else. Better still, a self-denying ordinance: for every new law banning things we must scrap half a dozen existing ones.
The police would approve. They are always complaining that they can’t enforce all the laws as it is. That’s why they have doubts about banning motorists from using hand-held phones. How can we possibly justify having a law on seatbelts that saves us from ourselves and having no law to stop a moron crashing into us on the motorway while he’s dialling his girlfriend’s number? Maybe we should get rid of the seatbelt law in general and have one only for adults who don’t strap small children into proper safety seats. We don’t need to be saved from ourselves, but we do need some fresh thinking about what we are prepared to let the law do to us. We need to change the way we look at the things we don’t like — even if it’s something as emotive as foxhunting — and step aside from our own prejudices.
When a ban is proposed on what someone else wants to do we tend to ask ourselves: “Would I want to do it?” If the answer is “No”, then we generally go along with it.
Instead we should ask: “Does it hurt anyone else if they do it?” If the answer to that one is “No”, then the law should be dumped.
Having settled that, I’m waiting for the findings of the research that was announced on Friday into the effects of mobile phones on the brains of children. If it proves that the phones are damaging then we can ban the blasted things — and feel good about it.