It looks like The Blogger’s favourite Tory gal, Bristol North West parliamentary candidate Charlotte Leslie, has found herself a “straight banana issue”.
This is the peculiarly Tory habit of “discovering” strange and bizarre pieces of legislation usually from Europe, but possibly from the Health & Safety Executive or the Commission for Racial Equality, that allow them to have a good old rant about how red tape/political correctness/big government are strangling the country/small business/the middle classes and ruining our way of life/simple pleasures/competitiveness.
Clearly this is an appalling state of affairs that, extraordinarily enough, can only be resolved by immediately electing common sense Tories like Charlotte. However there’s one small problem that tends to crop up time and again with these issues. On closer inspection it usually turns out that no such legislation actually exists.
Hence we’ve had claims over the years that the EU was insisting that the UK’s greengrocers must only sell straight bananas; that children are legally prevented from playing conkers at school; that Baa Baa Black Sheep contravenes race equality legislation and so on. All of it utter bollocks.
On her blog Charlotte is bemoaning the fact that some pub won’t cook her a rare steak because of “Health and Safety”:
But no. No steak to be served anything less than a grey-pink opaque medium, because health and safety dictate that it should be so.
When health and safety dictate how you have your steak cooked, you know something’s going very, very wrong.
Meanwhile, on another side of town, 11-year-old tear-aways are allowed to play havoc with the law . . . Blah, blah, blah . . .
All well and good except, of course, no such health and safety legislation exists or has ever existed in this country.
Which just leaves the one question unanswered. Who the hell in their right mind orders a rare steak in a pub anyway? Would you trust a pub chef to cook a rare steak?
Rather than anything to do with health and safety legislation, perhaps the barman knew something Charlotte didn’t about the quality of the chef?
The dream of 99% of pub lndlords is to turn their pub into a resurant with a bar. For years they have been blaming the EC for banning dogs, gutting out snug bars etc when it’s what they want to do.