Beware the dinosaur right

There’s a reason why so many young lads are on the Restorationist train, and it’s because they’re not old enough to remember the 1980s. This explains the the bizarre alliance between them and elderly nostalgists who want to turn the clock back to the Thatcher years. They have a certain amnesia when it comes to the 1980s.

They forget that Blairism did not happen in a vacuum. The British state was a decrepit, antiquated system that was in need of modernisation and reform of it was very popular. Right now I’m just reading a Peter Hitchens article about the “tyranny of health and safety” harking back to the days where government (and employers) could be negligent, cause serious injury, and not be held to account for it, and the police (without exaggeration) could pretty much get away with murder.

As someone who lived through the nineties as an early career bureaucrat, I remember well the onslaught of transformative new regulations, many of which were met with incredulity and fury (under the media theme of “health and safety gone mad”) where the Daily Mail would often cite the absurdity of McDonalds being sued for serving coffee so hot it could cause second degree burns.

At the time I worked in a very large chemical plant and my job was developing a document management system to cope with the new regime of health and safety paperwork from vessel entry permits though to health and safety assessments and written procedures. Much of it was ISO compliance rather than government regulation.

This generated quite a lot of onerous bureaucracy and red tape which chewed up a lot of management time, where virtually every major task required a team leader to produce a risk assessment. Everybody complained about it, but these were the same lads who would reminisce about a colleague who’d put his hand inside a rotary valve to check if it was on. If memory serves, three people were killed at work there in the space of about five years. For my part, I guess I’m just a woke bureaucrat who generally hopes to do a shift at work and come home alive.

What this system did was change the culture and imposed an order of operations on shutdowns and cleaning operations. It forced companies to take accidents at work seriously. It also forced companies to build health and safety into the design of their factories and buildings. Yes this was an expensive regulatory overhead, but why shouldn’t employers be imposed with a duty of care? Serious accidents in Braford’s textile mills were commonplace.

What I also remember about the 1990s, was a lot of modernisation of public buildings from libraries to railway stations which were never designed with the visually impaired and wheelchair bound in mind. The last thirty years have been a revolution in terms of inclusion and corporate responsibility. This one of the reasons many disabled people can now work.

Peter Hitchens complains that we now have an ambulance chasing culture, I don’t see a problem with corporations and governments being held to account for their negligence and people being adequately compensated for their injuries.

Now I’m not saying there aren’t gobsmacking egregious cases or that all of the red tape is justified, and equality laws have taken this culture into the realms of the absurd, but that’s just the cases you read about int he news. I would not seek to dismantle all of this. I want to know that the the NHS cuts off the wrong leg I can rinse them for millions. I’m glad that I can sue the police for dragging me out of my home in the middle of the night for posting a meme on X.

And this is my problem with the entire restorationist agenda. They want to nuke it all back to year zero. I don’t. I think it needs reform and in some cases scaling back, but that requires understanding how the system works now and devising targeted system repair policies. But that requires a level of careful research that the slopulist right just can’t be bothered to do.

One of the reasons I like Peter Hitchens is that he’s not a romanticist about the past in that he openly states he would not like to go back to the 1950s but he is certainly of an ilk that wants to go back to the 1980s, but as someone who’s been described as “the Peter Hitchens of the far right”, I don’t want to go back to the 1980s because it sucked for a list of reasons that would keep you here til midnight.

This is one of the reasons the Restorationist agenda is not going to win a majority. There’s a lot of us around who still remember the 1980s, not least the justice system where quite famously, judges were so out of touch there were on a different planet - leading to multiple miscarriages of justice.

You can now argue with some credibility that it’s gone too far the other way, but I’m not looking for a factory reset button because I remember just how dysfunctional and unjust it all was. The Guildford Four were charged with murder and explosive offences and were put on trial based solely on confessions which had been coerced by violence, threats, intimidation and other unlawful behaviour by the police.

That, and other cases like it, is why the police came under such scrutiny. they were practically a law unto themselves and had been for all of time. Everyone wants to police to go back to the era of Gene Hunt until their first involvement with them. Anyone who remembers the Yorkshire Ripper investigation will know how some victims were largely ignored and sent on their way - just like many victims of grooming.

And since we’re on the subject, what do Restorationists who also bang on about grooming think will come from all this? More supervision, more accountability and more procedural “red tape” on the police - at their behest. Every complaint will have to be taken seriously, and rightly so.

There are many good reasons why the British state underwent a massive transformation in the 1990s, not least because there was more scrutiny in the age of television, and part of the reason there is so much demand for change now is because social media brings 24/7 scrutiny of just about every detail of government. This brings more calls for data transparency, which of itself calls for more surveillance systems and back office administrators; the very people Restorationists want to axe. Well, kids, you can’t have it both ways.