Those magnificent men in their flying machines! The aeronautical innovators wouldn’t ever have got off the ground if they had been weighed down by onerous health and safety regulations, so why do we need them now?
That is the question being posed by Brexit idiot of the day, Grant Shapps. The same old trick of comparing two utterly different situations linked by a common thread is alive and kicking.
It’s the free market ideology turned up to eleven. Yeah, freedom, yeah, deregulation, but without a common rulebook you are going to quite literally run into trouble.
Imagine. The British aerospace industry makes its own rules. These rules will differ from everyone else’s. Otherwise, what’s the point?
But to fly in another jurisdiction’s airspace, their rules must be followed. So, to fly over Europe, the new rules must be at least as stringent as EASA. Logically, that’s an increase in regulation.
That won’t happen either. Brexiters say they hate red tape. So standards will be lowered. So British standard aeroplanes won’t be allowed out of British airspace. That’s fine. Other countries are too full of foreign people anyway. And if the wings fall off the plane on your internal flight? Tough. That’s the risk you take if you only want to pay a Brexit 50p for your seat.
Not that any of this has occurred to Shapps. The total lack of accountability means that no policy is ever scrutinised, and no pronouncement ever looked at critically. So you can say what you like, whether it makes sense or not, and blame someone else when it all goes tits up.
None off this bothered the Wright Brothers, whose homemade aircraft lacked seat belts, indicators and a handbrake. It would have failed an MoT, but it did actually fly. That’s good enough for Shapps, and it should be good enough for you too.
Progress, eh? It’s like experts. We’ve had enough!