Bureaucracy - UK

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No, you can't dance. Not if you are in the Lounge Bar in Stockport, England. It's not that the bar's owners, Lucy O'Brien and Rick Clements, disapprove of dancing, it's that the local council disapproves of dancing.

Lucy and Rick would like patrons to be allowed to dance. When they set up the Lounge Bar in 2008, they planned to have music and dancing in an upstairs room. When the room was ready, they did the right thing and applied for council approval. They submitted all sorts of documentation to support their application, including an engineer's report saying that the floor of the upstairs room was structurally safe for dancing.

The council granted a permit allowing music to be played in the room. The council granted a permit for DJs to operate in the room. The council refused a permit for dancing in the room. We disagree, the council said, with the engineer who said the floor was fine.

Since then Lucy and Rick have tried to run their business, offering food, drink and music, but not dancing. On that front, they put up No Dancing posters. They instructed staff to discourage any movement which looked like dancing. "We have done all we can to discourage people, but you can't tie people's legs together,'' Lucy O'Brien said.

No, we don't suppose you can. Which is unfortunate because a passing policeman recently saw three girls dancing in The Lounge's upstairs room and reported the matter. The council has decided to prosecute. The Lounge faces a fine of up to 1,600 pounds (about US$2,500).

After two years of living with bureaucratic quibbling that she wasn't happy with in the first place, Lucy O'Brien opened fire. "Dancing is not a crime," she said. "The council has been completely over-zealous. People being paid to find things like this is a waste of taxpayers' money."

A council spokesman responded: "The company was fully aware of the restrictions and the risk to customers but chose to continue to operate regardless of this. We believe that the appropriate action was to prosecute on the grounds of public safety."

Council, your partner in fine dancing.

There are no winners here.
news.com.au

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Bureaucracy, Consumer fights back, Europe, UK, Small business

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Pandemic hysteria about paedophilia

September 24th 2010 18:22

: How far

Two news reports this week make one wonder how far the global tidal wave of protectionism towards children will go.

From England comes the story of the Coventry Sports Foundation, which has decided that parents watching their children play sport creates too much pressure for the child. And so the charitable organisation, which runs dozens of after-school clubs across the city of Coventry, has banned parents from all events.

From Australia came the story of a mother with a digital camera trained on her son during a kids athletics carnival being asked to put the camera away because other parents might be nervous of a stranger filming their children.

This "pandemic hysteria about paedophilia", as news.com.au blogger Jack Marx calls it, has gone too far.

It's as bad as the days when political correctness went too far and started to strangle the right of free speech.

In the Coventry case, Neil Carter, 47, was booted out of the changing rooms minutes before his five-year-old son Joshua was due to play a football match. Carter was there because it was his son's first after-school, club football match, because his son is naturally shy, and because it is, well, expected that a parent would watch over a five-year-old in public.

No, said the Coventry Sports Foundation. It had a shiny new child protection policy and any parents turning up at events to cheer their kids on could forget it.

dailymail.co.uk, The Jack Marx Affair blog

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Australia, Bureaucracy, UK

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British school bans short skirts

June 23rd 2010 13:13

VYOOS EDITORIAL

A British school has banned teenage girls from wearing skirts.

St Aidan's Church of England High School in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, has decreed that all girls aged 15 and younger must from now on wear trousers.

The reason given by the school is that it wishes to save the girls from attracting unwanted attention. Very young children, and even more disturbingly, special needs children are clearly wholly unaware of the signals they are giving out,'' it said in a statement

We wish to inform St Aidans School that the attention is not unwanted. It is entirely wanted. We would also like to notify St Aidans that becoming aware of the signals sent out by our actions is a crucial part of growing up.

Short skirts were shocking in the early 1960s. They have been part of the fashionscape ever since. That one group of teachers in a small town in Yorkshire should decide to impose a minority, blinkered view and say short skirts are unacceptable is to fly in the face of 50 years of conventional western acceptance.

More important, however, is finding the balance between tolerance and guidance in dealing with teenagers.

The school is saying it doesnt like the decisions its teenagers are making. It is missing the point that all decisions have repercussions, and we all learn from those repercussions. Its a fundamental of life in a community. That process is more important for teenagers than any other age group. They stand on the threshold of adulthood, and it is crucial that they be given the freedom, within the relative safety of their home and school environments, to interact with the world and, thereby, learn what works and what doesnt.

Schools are for learning. If teenagers can not learn there how to think for themselves, they will have to learn later in a less-forgiving environment.
news.com.au

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Bureaucracy, Europe, UK, Fashion, Vyoos Editorial

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No kissing allowed

February 18th 2009 04:11

We've all smiled at happy reunions as people get off planes, trains or buses and collapse into the arms of waiting loved ones. And we've all empathised with tearful farewells in the same places.

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