Open Road

Tuesday Jan 12th 2010

Road to ruin

Everyone’s bored of the snow, right?  But Salieri can’t resist one final observation on the irritating debate about householders clearing their pavements.  Not so much on whether one then becomes liable for accidents if pedestrians slip on the exposed surface, but on two other matters.  First, are we happy with a society where if an accident did happen, fallers would feel morally comfortable with the idea of suing people who were trying unselfishly to help them?  Second, what is it with lawyers that they would take on such a case?  On second thoughts, forget the lawyer question.  Nothing better about the legal profession has been said since Shakespeare’s Dick the Butcher:  ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers’ (Henry VI pt 2).
One is tempted to link all this to the general trend over the last fifty years for people to surrender more and more freedom of action to the state and its many employees: who purport to help us while in practice preventing positive action by others while doing nothing themselves.  But that would be tedious.  Let us just note that we live in a country where helping others is not a moral question but a legal and procedural one.