Personal injury lawyers be damned. Let's pass a Stuff Happens Act

As we all know, there will have been a new government elected by this time next year, of one persuasion or another. What piece of legislation ought to be top of the new Parliament’s agenda? (Let’s exclude, just for the purposes of argument, the widespread demand for a series of Nuremberg trials of the outgoing government, with yours truly strung up alongside them for complicity. I take your point: I remember what my own feelings were about the Tories c. 1996.)

Actually my own candidate would probably go down well with the Telegraph fraternity. I’m sure that what we most need is a bonfire of Elf ‘n’ Safety regulations and their preposterous interference in the normal lives of citizens. Children are supposed to grow up with assorted bruises and occasional broken limbs – I’d broken both arms and acquired a hernia before I came of age, not to mention having to confront my father with a golf-ball-size bump on my head which I had no recollection of having sustained (school leaving party).

But there’s a backstory to Elf ‘n’ Safety paranoia. It is, of course, Personal Injury lawyers. Schools and local councils more or less have to apply strong E ‘n’ S rules if they’re risking being sued for millions. This is the root to which the axe needs to be laid. I will greet with a magnum of the good stuff the “Stuff Happens Act 2010”. The thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to can no longer be treated as a ticket in the great Compensation Lottery. If someone has been caused direct financial loss by an accident which was clearly caused by outrageous negligence, then fair enough. But I can’t wait to see the back of the endless adverts for ambulance-chasing law firms offering the chance of big payouts, usually at the taxpayer’s expense one way or another. About a year ago I tripped over a wonky paving stone in the London Borough of Camden and broke two fingers; I still can’t quite clench my right fist. (Fortunately I’m a southpaw.) Every now and then, contemplating the wreck of my finances, I wonder whether I wasn’t a bit stupid not to sue like daytime TV viewers would.

Credit where credit’s due: Mayor Boris, whom I rather admire, is consistently vocal on this topic; indeed he coined the formulation ‘elf ‘n’ safety’. It has frequently occurred to me that consistent campaigning on this issue should sweep Call-Me-Dave to power. So why do we hear so little from him? Labour could make some ground with it too, now that the Prime Minister is no longer a lawyer married to another lawyer. Again, silence. Could it be that there are just too many lawyers in Parliament, on both sides of the house, for common sense to prevail at the expense of their personal incomes?

No doubt we have all sympathised at times with Dick the Butcher in Jack Cade’s rebellion in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 2: “The first thing we’ll do, let’s kill all the lawyers”. Perhaps I’d stop short of that, but I’d still recommend a good look at the backgrounds of next year’s parliamentary candidates, and refuse bluntly to vote any more barristers or solicitors into Parliament. That way the “Stuff Happens Act” might stand a chance.