A plague of signs
Rod Liddle on the proliferation of pointless public notices, and the loss of trust they imply you know that you're in a very bad place when there are lots of signs around telling you not to punch the staff. By and large, the rule is this: the more prevalent the signs are in any one building, the worse the place will be. Also, if the signs tell you not just to refrain from kicking or hitting or spitting at the staff but also go on to explain precisely why such behaviour is unacceptable, then you know you're in hell. Waterloo Station has a couple of these notices pinned up near the ticket office. So do the job centres. There are one or two on the London Underground. And, of course, they are absolutely fecund at Heathrow Airport, fecund and long-winded. At Heathrow Airport they tell you not to kick the living daylights out of the staff because no matter how obstructive, surly, stupid or indolent they might be, they nonetheless have a 'right' to go about their daily chores without fear of assault from members of the public. Actually, it doesn't quite say all of that, but you get the gist.
Heathrow, we know, is wholly murderous; an appalling place which is run for the convenience of its owners and the staff rather than benighted travellers who are forced to use it. If ever there was an airport which deserved a bunch of signs pinned up saying: Please feel free to smack around or headbutt any member of our workforce who refuses to help you or misdirects you or arbitrarily puts up one of those temporary barriers so you can't get to where you're going without a 500-yard detour', then Heathrow is the place. And in a perfect world these signs might add: 'While normally we would expect you to behave with civility and good grace towards all fellow human beings, we accept that at Heathrow Airport your experiences may be so traumatic that they'd justify the occasional spurt of extreme physical violence. So punch away.'
But, clearly, it's not a perfect world, either at Heathrow Airport or anywhere else in Britain. These signs warning us all against sociopathic behaviour are, instead, more evidence of our swift and relentless descent into the abyss. It is only comparatively recently that we have seen their like. In the old days there might have been signs around telling us to adjust our dress before we leave the public convenience or, in some institutions, severe exhortations not to spit. But it was never thought necessary to tell us to refrain from twatting other people together with an explanation of why, existentially, it is fundamentally wrong to twat other people.
Which means that either service industry workers at Heathrow and London Underground and the like have become so utterly useless and infuriating that otherwise normal people now wish to inflict physical punishment upon them; or that people quite simply are not normal anymore and have become predisposed to acts of violence with an alacrity which even 20 years ago would have seemed astonishing.
Or, of course. both.
The signs usually conclude by telling you how the workers will get their own back on you if you do punch them. You will definitely be prosecuted and you will face a big fine or imprisonment or both. I am not sure, though, how effective these notices are as a deterrent. I think it highly unlikely that anyone about to smack an ignorant airport lackey would desist from doing so having been summarily directed, immediately before the act, were that possible, to one of these notices. I have the horrible suspicion that it might make the potential miscreant more likely to smack the lackey, or perhaps to smack him or her a lot harder. And I have the further horrible suspicion that this might be the real reason the signs are there in the first place: to rile and antagonise customers. It is absolutely clear that at Heathrow, for example, the staff loathe the customers and wish them to be permanently unhappy and irritable. I suspect the unions at the airport agitated for these stupid signs to be put up knowing that they would be no use at all as a deterrent but would, instead, remind the general public that they are scum who deserve to be harangued about their general behaviour.
I saw a statistic recently which suggested that assaults on staff at London Underground are indeed increasing in number. Apparently an assault on a member of staff takes place once every nine and a half minutes, which makes such behaviour on the part of travellers rather more dependable and frequent than the Northern Line trains. A news report showed clips from CCTV cameras of ticket collectors, or whatever they call them now, being arbitrarily punched or kicked in 'broad daylight' and with other members of the paying public looking on quite oblivious. It is a mercy, I suppose, that the bystanders weren't actually applauding, or queuing up to be next.
Some time ago I carried out a little experiment as I entered Oxford Circus Tube station. I counted the number of stupid signs there were telling me stuff which, were one possessed of even the most basic morality or social conscience, one knew already. From the station entrance to the inside of the Victoria Line Tube train, there were 37 such exhortations appearing in either written or spoken form. Stand here. Don't stand there. Buy a ticket or we'll fine you. Carry your pushchairs. Don't punch the staff. Move along the platform. Stand back from the edge — no, not there, but further along. Don't leave your bags on the platform. Don't give money to beggars. Shut up, get in line and do as you're bloody well told, you idiot, you're being watched.
All of this stuff is a function, I suppose, of an increasingly crowded country where the infrastructure is no longer remotely up to the task. But every one of these pointless and, to me at least, annoying instructions somehow serves to dissolve the glue which binds society together. We are not trusted any more to behave with either common sense or a regard for our fellow men; we must instead be harangued and threatened with imprisonment if we transgress. And the signs have a purpose only retrospectively: after you've punched a ticket collector or decided against purchasing a ticket, you can be all the more severely upbraided because you were advised in advance about the penalties for such behaviour.
A little while ago a small village in East Anglia tried an experiment. The village authorities ripped up all the road signs howling at drivers to slow down, watch out, drive carefully, this is a village, etc. A similar experiment in Holland went so far as to remove road markings and even traffic lights at junctions. In both cases the experiment was a success. People drove more carefully (and the accident rate was cut) because they were forced to look at their surroundings and make common-sense judgments for themselves. Sadly, it's the sort of experiment which you just know won't catch on.
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