Take a running jump!

THE Mayor of London, Boris Johnson is not at all amused at the Port of London Authorities new rule that no one can now swim in the tidal Thames without permission.

He is rather outspoken on the subject:

"To swim, perchance to drown, is an undeniable human right The Port of London Authority should take a running jump into the Thames—only they've just made it illegal."

Bureaucratic bossiness

Boris goes on to remark that at least we can't blame Brussels for this one, folks. This is all our own work, and as a piece of bureaucratic bossiness there has been little to touch it in all the dismal annals of 'elf and safety' . It is a ban that came into force yesterday, without any democratic consultation whatever, and you can't help wondering: Why us? Why now? Adding:

"Monarchs have been rowed upon it in glorious pageants of the kind we recently recreated. We have drunk it, skated on it, painted it, and drawn its inexhaustible waters to boil hides, brew beer, and float the boats that made the empire.

"The river has nourished virtually all the industrial processes of what was once the workshop of the world. Sometimes the Thames has been so polluted as to be a glorified sewer. At other times it has been so crowded with navigation that you could hardly see the water. And in all those thousands of years, and under all those kings and queens and parliaments, there has never been a body so tyrannical that it tried to tell the freeborn people of this country that they could not voluntarily immerse themselves in the river. Even during the Great Stink of 1858, it seems that Londoners were left entirely to make up their own minds."

You may not swim

As of last week, however, the Port of London Authority has decided that you may not swim in the Thames, at London, without a permit, with Boris further complaining:

"The PLA is not accountable to the Mayoralty, I should say, which is itself an absurd state of affairs. It is supposed to report to Justine Greening, but it seems that our excellent Transport Secretary was no more consulted about the matter than I was.

"So let me put this as politely as I can: we don't need some bunch of well-meaning quangocrats to click their fingers and decide that sentient adult human beings must be kept out of the river. We don't need them to tell us that you will find currents and eddies and boats. Boats! On the river! Well I never! We don't need advising that swimming in the strong tidal flow is risky—it's blinking obvious.

"David Walliams has raised squillions for charity by swimming in the Thames, and people like him need to be encouraged, not deterred by bureaucracy and risk assessments.

"We don't want swimming banned because of the current, as though we had only just discovered that there was a current. This is the kind of gratuitous legislation that is sapping the moral fibre of the nation.

"I am being quite serious when I say that this river-swimming ban is of a piece with the namby-pamby, risk-averse, mollycoddled airbagged approach that is doing so much economic damage to Britain and that is not found, frankly, in our Asian economic competitors.

"But if you bathe in the river that flows through the city, then wham, you are nicked. It plainly needs to be the other way round. In so far as there are innocent and slightly barmy people who want to swim in the Thames, then they should be allowed to indulge their preferences in peace. It's time for the 'elf and safety' fanatics to take a running jump—off the pier at Putney."