Surely they must have something better to do? That is often my reaction when confronted by a bureaucrat wielding a booklet of detailed rules and regulations.
It could be the lifeguard at my local pool who blew his whistle with passionate fervor to ask two boys to leave the pool. Why? Because they wore swimming shorts as opposed to swimming trunks and the pool rules state that only trunks are allowed. Their mother tried to intervene. She pleaded and argued but to no avail. As the rules state that only swimming trunks are allowed, the boys could not swim in the pool.
I thought that too when the security agents at Heathrow airport did not let us go through because our luggage was the wrong shape to be taken in as hand luggage. They agreed that the girls’ bags were small and light but they were just an inch too long. The disappointed faces of two young girls would not make them budge. My bag was OK, it was bigger and heavier, but it was within the right measurements. The man shrugged his shoulders at me: “I don’t make the rules”.
Or it could be the traffic wardens in Venice who will slap you with a fine for eating a sandwich in St. Marks Square, or their counterparts in Rome who will fine you for eating a sandwich on the Spanish Steps.
The Olympic champions of rule-making have long been the technocrats at the European Commission who have spent time and energy defining such things as how much a banana should be allowed to curve for it to be labeled a banana and cleared for sale in the EU. Not just bananas of course, but all types of fruit and vegetables.
Europeanwide standardization makes sense. Your goods clear one set of regulations and can be sold throughout the euro zone. But when the regulations become so detailed as to become ridiculous — and boy have the Europeans been teased about their rules on bendy fruit and knobbly vegetables — the results is wastage of some 20 percent. In other words, about one in five apples produced is considered not good enough for sale because it is too big or too small or has the wrong shape. It may taste just the same as its prettier sisters, it may have the same nutritional value, but it cannot be sold in the European Union.
Those rules have caused the European Commission much ridicule over the years and finally this week they have been scrapped. Or almost. The rules have been scrapped for 26 fruit and vegetables but will remain in place for another ten, including apples. It just so happens that those ten that make up the bulk of fruit and vegetables sold in the EU! So apples which are too small or too big or too knobbly will still be held back from sale as regular apples, though they will now be able to be sold if they are packaged as substandard with a label such as “intended for processing”. As for bananas, they have their very own set of rules and regulations and those remain.
There are many examples of rules and regulations that make sense when applied as guidelines but make little sense when applied to the letter. And not just in the EU. There is no shortage of bureaucrats in the Middle East compiling detailed regulations and pushing paper from ministry to ministry, nor is there a shortage of bureaucrats applying the rules with the same fervor as the lifeguard in my local pool. And just like the lifeguard who might have been better employed saving lives rather than checking on dress codes, and the traffic wardens who should have better things to do than to harass people calmly eating a cheese sandwich, those bureaucrats could be far better employed. But, and this is the question, perhaps they like it. Perhaps devising detailed rules on what we can and cannot — do and harassing people because their bags, their clothes or the food they would like to eat does not satisfy a narrow set of criteria gives them some sense of power or at least achievement.
In theory at least intelligent people should have far more meaningful things to do than to decide on when a banana is a banana. Surely we the customers can decide whether a banana is bendy enough to qualify as a banana we would like to buy.
Moreover, is it not the case that the more you strive for such things as harmonization and standardization, the more you end up defining what is normal and acceptable and the result is the disappearance of the original or exceptional. It may be wasteful yet harmless when it comes to something like fruit and vegetables, but is there not a parallel in society as a whole? Culturally are we not increasingly urging people to conform to a narrower and narrower set of acceptable criteria? Is conformity really such an attractive goal?
