Burn Bureaucrats

A Fire Instruction Notice has appeared in the hall to my block of flats where no such notice has ever been seen before. The building is owned by one of the big London landlords who have always been punctilious in doing everything by the book. I should know because I used to act for them. Not having kept up with new regulations relating to blocks of flats etc. I wonder whether this is a whim of the landlords or of the managing agents or as a result of yet another Government regulation or an EU Directive. Whatever it is it is a complete waste of money because I doubt whether any of us in this building will read it or if we do, will remember its contents. When one hears about the cost of regulation it is impossible to comprehend the quoted numbers. But then I tried to work out the cost of producing this Notice. There are the taxes to pay those to think of the regulation, to print it, to debate and pass it into law, to publish it, and the cost to the landlords to manage putting the regulation into effect, to employ lawyers to interpret it, to manage the distribution of the Notice and to put it up in a prominent place in the hall for all to see like the bloody No Smoking signs defacing our common parts. One can see that the cost of this single, useless Notice has now run into the tens of thousands. No wonder countries burdening themselves with the cost of regulation are pricing themselves out of the market. Our government is bad enough at producing pointless and counterproductive regulation but the EU is a thousand times worse. This Fire Instruction Notice will not save one life should a fire break out in our building but it will have put up our service charge so that some slob somewhere can feel good about himself. Save us from bureaucrats - better still, burn the lot of them for all the bloody use they are! Brilliant academically they may be but not one whit of common sense among any of them.