Rugby aside, New Zealanders are not great exponents of overkill, which is why the little-used power to crush boy racers’ cars has been massively superseded by the deterrent employed by a genteel county in England.
Recent complaints from indignant drivers have brought to light a little-known scheme in a leafy Cambridgeshire village, which, while conceived a little later than New Zealand’s, has been considerably more successful.
In St Ives, a literal car trap has been installed. It’s a massive slanting pothole into which any car that sneaks across its bus-only lane will plunge. Such is the damage sustained that a significant number of the 60-odd cars so far caught have had to be sent to the crushers.
An average of five cars a week still get trapped, suggesting the deterrent factor after 12 years is ripe for review. But the local authority was unrepentant when challenged about the measure. It said it had erected a “Car Trap” sign, and people who ignored it, or who could not fathom what it meant, or who were shocked to be suddenly imprisoned in an inverted bollard, should not be on the road.
Such next-level tough love is also old news in Japan, where the government has for 15 years required employers regularly to weigh and measure employees aged 40 or more, and chivvy them into losing weight if they’re outside the state’s deemed healthy norm. Companies must lay on counsellors to prescribe diet and exercise solutions, and the whole chivvying process is repeated until it works. Companies are fined if the chivvying goes on too long without success.
No one sensible disputes that obesity is unhealthy or fat-shaming is counter-productive. But for the state to forcibly subcontract people’s bosses to police their avoirdupois makes fasting and even jaw-wiring seem namby-pamby. No wonder Jenny Craig went bust.
Presumably the “Your Puku is Costing Your Boss Money” diet works. Japan’s sub-4% obesity rate is among the lowest in the world.
Hopefully, the Japanese are more decent than to shy away from employing suspiciously plump staff to spare themselves this palaver, but that has to be a risk.
Britain supplies a newer example of intrusive overkill, with ITV television bosses now requiring staff to disclose their “significant” friendships and relationships. This comes after the brow-smiting over breakfast TV’s Phillip Schofield’s secret romance with a much younger junior staffer on the show.
The undercurrents of this kerfuffle have been exhaustively prodded, including the unsettling question of whether Schofield would have been so pilloried had his adultery been heterosexual.
The new edict doesn’t resolve this question to anyone’s satisfaction. The judgment call is all one-way. This employer reserves the right to contractually enforce a value judgment about staff’s private lives. The chief executive will decide that you can have this friendship but not that one, this infidelity but not that peccadillo.
This makes the Japanese boss’s tape-measure surveillance seem pretty benign. Until recently, a clause in one’s contract stipulating that one will not bring one’s employer into disrepute was thought sufficient. Now, even banks – not traditionally concerned with anything other than customers’ solvency – are policing depositors’ private associations.
As has become apparent only this year after the “de-banking” of politician Nigel Farage, some banks arbitrarily sack customers, claiming their values don’t align with the bank’s.
Given many banks’ predatory practices, the notion that their values could ever be traduced takes some getting one’s head around. Hopefully, customers will rebel globally if banks or other institutions start whipping out the tape measure or auditing their social connections.
But stealth pits to eliminate cheating motorists … that’s catnip to a certain type of bureaucrat. Look out.
