Licenses for bootblacks and news boys but not, alas, for
analytical chemists in most provinces.
For 150 years, the British humour
magazine, Punch, had a
global reputation. But in its
early days few knew it would
become famous for a different sort of
humour when it emerged that the publishers
had once rejected an essay by
Charles Dickens on the state of
London's drinking water. The
British capital had been a disease
ridden place for centuries,
cursed with poor drinking water
quality along with sporadic
bouts of cholera which experts
had wrongly concluded was an
airborne disease.
That Punch would reject an
essay from such a legendary
author, whose writing often
blended pathos with humour,
seems - in retrospect - especially
farcical for a humour
magazine.
What, and exactly when,
Dickens wrote about London's
water is lost to history but the
joke ultimately was on Punch.
Dicken's reputation grew
steadily while that of Punch
declined, ceasing publication in its
sesquicentennial year.
The UK's undeniable talent for political
farce includes the ribald humour
of the Monty Python series, Benny Hill,
Mr. Bean and John Cleese, to name but
a few. But even this array of satirical
talent has been eclipsed by the latest idiocy
from The Mother of all Parliaments,
a Window Tax which appropriately, but
absurdly, came into force on April Fool’s
Day of this year. The idea of taxing
windows is not new. When I worked in
London, I often saw windows bricked
up in older buildings, being vaguely
aware that it had something to do with
some long-gone taxation regulation. But
not even the Georgian Window Tax prepared
me for something called the Fenestration
Self-Assessment
Scheme
(Fensa for short).
This is a new UK
regulation requiring
homeowners to get
plans approved before
replacing their own windows. The
idea is to reduce global warming by reducing
the leakage of warm air into the
atmosphere. Even amidst the recent deluge
of global warming disinformation,
Fenestration ranks highly in the hierarchy
of idiotic environmental initiatives.
The date being April Fool’s Day,
made me feel sure it was a hoax, as Fenestration
seems to resonate with the hint
of do-it-yourself vasectomies. But we
are talking about a double whammy
oxymoron here - political common sense
and the law of the land. So I phoned a
friend in England who thought I had
been April Fooled by anything so absurd
as a “window tax”. But she humoured
me by going to a Borough
Council where she was duly amazed to
be presented with an appropriately green
form, Notes for Guidance - Replacement
Windows and Doors. It was true.
The land which gave us the Magna
Carta now says homeowners are regulated
when they wish to replace windows
in their own houses.
Boris Johnson, editor of The Spectator,
British MP and literary wit, took aim
at the new window regulations with a
sharp editorial pen. “As you walk around
London, you will suddenly see them
everywhere - blank walls and sightless
facades, disfigured streets and pathetic
.” Why? Because, in 1797,
the British government of the day decided
to treble an existing window tax
to pay for the Napoleonic Wars.
The appropriately named Mr.
Johnson, like his namesake Dr. Samuel
Johnson, definitely has a cutting way
with words, like slivers of broken glass
in fact. He went on to stress that, “Amsterdam
houses are narrow because
they were taxed on the
width of their houses. Modern
Greeks pay taxes only on structures
that are complete. That
is why the landscape is littered
with upside-down concrete
parthenons.”
Before April 1, British
homeowners replaced windows
as they thought fit. Now
plans must be submitted before
windows may be replaced or
upgraded, and provided that an
on-site window inspection is
agreed to. It is estimated that
the whole exercise could cost
the homeowner between £180
and £300 in bureaucratic measures
alone. To avoid this absurdity,
one must become a
member of Fensa, the new
guild of window-inserters. But there are
undeniable benefits. Membership in
Fensa gives homeowners the right to
replace windows or doors without submitting
to a government inspection,
wrote Mr. Johnson. But membership
costs £370 per year. If there is any
logic in this, it has escaped me. Fensa
very definitely seems not to be a child
of Mensa.
Odd as the British window regulations
seem, there were once equally idiotic
Canadian regulations whereby bootblacks,
along with newspaper vendors
had to be licensed in Toronto at the turn
of the 20th century. Even today, hairdressers
and hot dog vendors require licenses.
Absurdly, especially following the
lethal drinking water problems in Ontario
and Saskatchewan, analytical
chemists - learned, skilled and important
as they are - are not required to be
licensed in most provinces in Canada.
That this profession, so vital to public
health, remains unlicensed is just as absurd
as the Fenestration fiasco across
the Atlantic.
