We deserve the freedom the Dutch enjoy

In Amsterdam, I was gratified to see the streets and tram-tracks thronged with cyclists, young, middle-aged and very old, along with motor-scooter riders, male and female, all wearing no helmets.

It is not that I want to see crushed skulls or gory corpses, but I laud the personal freedom that this implies.

Here, when the health and safety issue arises in conversation, the consensus invariably is that we have allowed bureaucratic nannies to earn secure employment and good salaries by dreaming up more and more legislation to protect us from ourselves.

Expensive public propaganda warns us against riding bikes without helmets or rowing boats without wearing life-jackets. Such directives are not yet enshrined in law, but may well be before long.

Manufacturers of helmets and life-jackets will then celebrate and martinets charged with framing new laws and penalties will thank the bureaucrats/Eurocrats for creating new jobs at the taxpayer’s expense.

Many citizens, old and young, are concerned that & health and safety diktats and the nanny state will shortly subsume us all under a plethora of kill-joy, bureaucratic rules. Insurers contriving to charge a premium for a-risk-which-is-no-risk collude. Thus, when I wished to dig a pond in my garden three foot deep, I was told by the JCB driver that he could not do it, as his insurers would not cover him if anyone drowned in a hole he had dug more than 60cm, or 24 inches.

Similarly, the manager at Killarney National Park would not give me the name of the suppliers of traditional iron estate fencing for fear that if anyone fell over it in my garden, his insurers would not indemnify him if he was sued for telling me where I could find it.

Mediterranean countries, Spain, Italy and Greece continue to uphold the age-old concept of personal responsibility. If one is stupid enough to walk into a lamppost, one cannot claim against the local authority for putting it there. If one is foolish enough to sleepwalk into a pothole in the pavement, applying for compensation will be a waste of time. In some Far Eastern countries, driving on one side of the road or the other is optional, often dictated by the condition of the road surface. Is it not extraordinary that millions of Third-World citizens manage to remain alert enough to stay alive?

While many of my fellow citizens believe that nanny state rules have got “out of hand” and impinge upon natural freedoms, neither they nor I would condone irresponsible acts that might injure others (for example, driving a bike or car without brakes) or behaviour that would result in a cost on the public purse, such as going to sea ill-equipped in rough weather and requiring a lifeboat call-out.

However, so long as our behaviour presents no threat to others or the public purse, surely it is our birthright to act as we choose. It is a sensible rule that smokers can no longer damage the health of those in their vicinity or slipstream. It is a stupid rule that many fine buildings and natural wonders are defaced by protective ‘furniture’ or by the removal of traditional artefacts (eg erection of barriers at The Cliffs of Moher; replacement of classical estate fencing in Killarney’s Muckross estate), these enacted at the behest of insurers or on the assumption by bureaucrats that the public is inane enough to tangle themselves up in railing or fall off clifftops.

It is surprising that the lovely canals of old Amsterdam are not entirely fenced off to ensure that cyclists (helmet-less) do not ride into them. Happily, they are not, and that gives me hope.

I was also pleased to note that in Amsterdam people still read. I saw an ice-cream vendor so absorbed in a hardback tome that he could hardly tear himself away from the pages to serve his customers.

Bookshops were everywhere, large emporiums devoted to the written word. I could hardly believe my eyes. The trade magazine of The Society of Authors, of which I’m a member, bewails the closure of high street bookshops in Britain and the inroads of ebooks, which can store or download hundreds of titles from the internet and pay authors so little in royalties they simply will not be able continue writing. However, my Amsterdam visit temporarily allays these fears.