Banned wagon
A weekly survey of the things our rulers want to prohibit
IT was never likely that our legislators would be happy banning just items purposely designed for killing people, such as handguns and samurai swords. There are some who will not be satisfied until the human environment is constructed entirely from soft substances which cannot conceivably be used as weapons.
The government's move to persuade bars to serve beer in plastic glasses has already been commented on in this col umn, but it seems even that is not enough. Julie Morgan, Labour MP for Cardiff North, has set out on a crusade to 'ban the carrying of glasses and glass bottles in public'. How we are supposed to get our shopping home she does not explain, but presumably it will mean that in future we will have to buy our wine in boxes and our tomato ketchup in those red squashy plastic tomatoes that you used to see in transport cafés.
Admittedly, 'glassing', the act of attacking people with broken glasses and bottles, is one of the less charming aspects of our city-centres late in the evening. But if people are really intent on injuring their fellow human beings, it is very difficult to remove all potential weapons. If glasses and bottles are too dangerous to be used in public, what about knives and forks? To mention but the contents of a Clued° set, we ought, logically, to be banned from carrying in public lengths of rope or sections of lead piping. It is very difficult to see how any garden centre or DIY store could survive the quest for total public safety.
And to what end? A few years ago the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents published a list of all the domestic items with which people had come to grief the previous year, and the numbers of victims those items had claimed. Among the entries was 'tea cosy: one'.
Ross Clark
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