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Hang them, hang them high!

Karl Walker was told by a cleaning firm that he is not old enough to use hot water, washing up liquid and furniture polish or to empty bins.

The AS-level student and a friend were hired by Apollo Cleaning and worked in offices in Chippenham, Wiltshire, for a week until a regional manager ordered them to stop. The firm says it is following government guidelines by insisting on safety clearance.

At 16, Karl is old enough to join the Army and fire a gun, play the lottery, have sex legally and get married, but the firm said he required special permission to use cleaning equipment, including vacuum cleaners.

Karl, who is studying for four AS levels, said: "I just don\’t understand what is going on. How can I be too young to use a vacuum cleaner? It is so stupid. I want to earn a living."

His mother Susan, 47, said: "My son is legally old enough to get married or join the Army yet these people think he is too young to be able to hoover up. The entire situation is a joke."

Is there actually anything else that can be said about this other than hunt down the cretins who imposed this law upon us and kill them? Clean up the gene pool? Rid ourselves of those swimming in the shallow end?

7 thoughts on “Hang them, hang them high!”

  1. Effing and Blinding

    The big delusion peddled about our politicians (G Brown and pals + assorted goons in Europe) is they give a flying f*ck about creating jobs. They don’t.

    They don’t even know how it’s done.

    Does G Broon have an idea at all about how jobs are created? I don’t mean jobs where the salary is paid out of taxes extorted on pain of jail – that’s easy, anyone can do that. I mean jobs that mean both of the following criteria:

    1. if there are insufficient funds at the end of the month, the employee gets paid, G Brown’s family goes without.

    2. 100% of the employee’s salary + on costs are funded out of revenue received from voluntary sources (sales to customers etc) who have a choice to do business elsewhere.

    If Broon and pals had even a small idea how it’s done, they would take a live flame down to a lot of that employment legislation and torch a good bit of it.

  2. This is going to make these ‘staying in school or apprenticeship until 18’ policy fun, isn’t it?

    ‘Hello Fred. This is our machine shop where you will be learning to be a highly skilled tool maker. But not for the next two years. Looks like it’s making tea for you, then…….’

  3. Now there’s a young man who’ll have had his eyes opened early to the mind-bending stupidity of the ‘adults’ currently in charge.

    He’ll survive this small setback and be a wiser – and less easily hornswoggled – man for it!

  4. The problem is, johnb, that the onus is on the firm to interpret the regulations. If they get it wrong in one direction, all that happens is a kid doesn’t get to push a mop around. If they get it wrong in the other, HSE will fine them into bankruptcy (q.v. any number of apoplexy-inducing incidents chronicled by Christopher Booker.) Risk aversion has been fostered by the incredible unwillingness of bureaucrats to acquire a modicum of common sense and proportionality.

  5. David:

    Bureaucrats are neither lazy, stupid, nor lacking common sense; make an ordinary person a bureaucrat—and he’ll wind up acting like most of the others. It’s a system of restricted scope for individual decision-making, deliberately constructed to minimize the opportunities for
    despotic behavior. What’s more–it actually works reasonably well and is virtually indispensible for executive-branch functions.

    He who wants to reduce the aggravations characteristic of bureaucracy needs most of all to understand that the thing he opposes is an unavoidable result of the increasing level of government impingement on all aspects of life–in short, of socialism. Bureaucracy is the public face of socialism; even more, it is its ordinary and everyday mode of behavior.

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