The war on risk is a war on freedom
In an interview with this newspaper, the Princess Royal advises readers that there is no such thing as bad weather, “only inappropriate clothing” – and that is why she is so liked by the British public. Here is a lady who just gets on with it, with no fuss or complaint. She gets a lot done, too: Her Royal Highness is involved with more than 300 charities and organisations.
It is fair to say that if anyone knows about the madness of over-regulation, it is the Princess. She dismisses an unhealthy reliance upon statistics: they can be “very useful”, she says, but it’s infuriating when people are put into little boxes in order to get grants. Qualifications are wonderful things, of course, but the primary attribute that qualifies a volunteer is their desire to be a volunteer: we need to get back to saying “thank you for wanting to help”. And then there is the cultural turn against risk, even though the danger is precisely why some people are drawn to certain activities. The consequence of the war on risk, suggests the Princess, is a rise in even riskier diversions: “The safer some sports get, the more idiotic sports they then invent on the other side ... Maybe because there’s always going to be a group of people for whom risk-taking is part of their DNA.”
There are two paths the Government could take in the new year. It could seek to reassure the risk-averse that life outside the EU will continue almost unchanged, that we will carry over the European regulation and shadow the Continent for decades to come. This would be a terrible error. It would throw away the unique opportunity Brexit offers to take a different, liberating path towards freedom, self-government and opportunity.
The Left fantasises that Brexiteers want to deconstruct the state altogether, and nothing could be further from the truth. But the economic lesson of the past few years has been that those economies that over-regulate seal themselves off from change in the short-term, only to fossilise in the long-term.
The more open and flexible the economy, the more impressive a nation’s recovery from the credit crunch has often been. This law of common sense ought to apply to civil society, too, where an obsession with qualifications and the desire to mitigate as much risk as possible threatens to crush the volunteerist spirit. But a country is only as just as its society is free – and only as rich as its people are inventive. It is time to treat the British as adults, capable of governing their own lives.