Pond Pumps

My pond pump finally gave up the ghost this week. It’s been running with a wooden leg for several months now, so the decision was made; to get a new one. Simple enough, you might think. Go to the local aquarium shop, buy one, take it home and fit it. You might think that; apart from a little notice inside the box. “This is a notifiable item,” it warned in big unfriendly letters. According to the new building regulations that came into force earlier this year, I am required by law to notify my local building regulations officer – whomsoever that is – and get my “installation” approved before I install it. Yes, that had me thinking, too.

What exactly do you need to do to install a pond pump? Well, you put it in the pond, run the cable to a suitable socket and fix a plug to it. Then you plug it in through a ground fault circuit interruptor. Now, I realise that this is an outdoor item using electricity in the vicinity of water – as was its predecessor. However, it is a sealed unit designed to be immersed in water – that is why we call them pond pumps; they pump water in ponds. The socket in my greenhouse is of the outdoor variety designed to be used in potentially wet environments. So what is this government appointed bureaucrat supposed to approve? My plug wiring technique?

George Bernard Shaw once exhorted us to be careful about what we wished for. Once, I wished for a Labour government to remove the yoke of the Thatcher tyranny. To my undying shame, I supported and voted for this government in 1997 and 2001. Oh, I got what I wished for alright… and more. In my ignorance I believed the rhetoric about a fairer society. What I got was the overweening nanny state interfering in the minutiae of my everyday life. What I got was the state deciding that I am too incompetent, too untrustworthy, too stupid to manage “health and safety” in order to wire a three pin 13amp plug.

I am sufficiently compos mentis to be able to carry out a simple assessment of risk; water + electricity = death by electrocution, so I make sure that; as I can read; I follow the manufacturer’s clear instructions. It is not beyond the wit of ordinary folk to do this and we have been doing for rather longer than New Labour has been in power. Just how many pond pump electrocutions have there been after all? This obsession with health and safety has nothing to do with health and safety at all but with dogmatic control freakery and job justification for the public sector.

In the UK since the government was elected in 1997, we have seen a massive rise in public sector employment. There are those who have pondered just what it is that all these people do. After all these jobs do not contribute to the economy; they are funded by our taxes. Consequently it is no wonder that those taxes have risen to an overall tax burden of 37.1%. So now I know what I am paying for; the plug wiring police.