The Spectator's Notes

17 February 2007

One of the difficulties of modern citizenship is working out which authority is really responsible for some new intrusion in one’s life. Rother, our district council in Sussex, has just announced a ban on all dogs on all beaches in the summer months. It will also insist that they must, at all times, in all public places, including footpaths, be kept on leads (not more than a metre long). The council says it must do this under the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005. The Act’s explanatory notes, however, say that it is devolving powers from the Secretary of State to councils. I do not know which is true, although I notice that Rother Council has now withdrawn the announcement from its website and has put out a bleating notice about how complicated existing bylaws are. I should have thought complication is, for once, appropriate. The notion that the British public will ever tolerate a blanket instruction to keep our dogs on leads regardless of circumstances could never have occurred to anyone in our history, except to a bureaucrat of the 21st century.

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This column should never have pointed out that the driving test is the only remaining exam in which relevant ability and knowledge — and nothing else — are tested. Now, as if conscious that their exam is too old-fashioned in its objectivity, the Driving Standards Authority wants to add questions about ‘eco-driving’. Candidates will be asked how they, as drivers, can help the environment (does ‘Don’t drive’ count as a good answer?). How long before candidates are asked whether they come from two-car or fuel-inefficient families, and are marked down accordingly? How long before it is pointed out that far fewer girls than boys pass their driving test at 17, thus repeating a ‘cycle of disadvantage’? Wouldn’t it be fairer to avoid the stress of a single exam, it will be said, and have a modular test in which you drive around for years while teachers continuously assess your progress? Yes, there will be more deaths on the roads, but that is ‘a price worth paying’ in the fight for equality of access.

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My thanks are due to Tom Gross’s ever-vigilant website, normally on Middle Eastern subjects, for unearthing an interesting article published in Newsweek on 28 April 1975. Headlined ‘The Cooling World’, it reveals that the ‘evidence has begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it’: world temperatures are falling fast, it says, and a ‘little ice age’ might well be upon us. They (the meteorologists) are ‘almost unanimous’ that global cooling will produce a ‘drastic decline’ in agricultural productivity. In England, the magazine reported, two weeks of the growing season had been lost since 1950. Newsweek did admit that some of the proposed solutions, such as ‘melting the Arctic ice-cap by covering it with black soot’, ‘might cause problems far greater than they solve’; but it thundered, ‘The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.’ How will the Stern report read in 32 years’ time?