WRITTEN ON January 12th, 2007 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Uncategorized

Ross Clark’s book How to label a goat offers some dystopian ethnography

Red tape in Britain has reached epidemic proportions. In just 12 months the Government produced a shocking 3621 pieces of legislation, running to a total of 98,600 pages.That’s 70 times as long as War and Peace! …
- there are 279 different tax forms for businesses alone, asking a total of 6614 questions
- the notes explaining the Treasury’s ‘simpilified’ pensions’ regime ran to 1369 pages
- one police force discovered that it had a total of 1150 different forms on which to report crimes
- there are 1300 pages of road traffic law – and that does not even include the law preventing petrol stations selling
hot food after 11pm unless they apply for a licence
- a council spent £5000 planting yew trees to screen a new children’s play area. It then dug them up again after health
and safety experts advised children could fall ill if they gobbled ‘several handfuls’ of leaves

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