Bureaucracy is going mad

In my office hangs a picture: I am in a "dummy" restaurant being served by a gloved, helmeted and space-suited server. The caption reads: "Café Futura: where all the choices are made for you."

At the time, I was helping to promote an initiative by the Restaurant Association called the "Forum for Reasonable Regulation". At Café Futura, fat people were banned from eating fried foods, pregnant women could not buy alcohol, and steak knives were blunted to prevent injury. We were exaggerating to make a point - or so we thought. Yet, after five more years of regulation on everything from our food to our businesses, our system has become a bureaucratic self-parody.

Because of the risk of E coli, for example, Planet Hollywood now insists that customers sign a disclaimer if they want their hamburgers rare. Unpasteurised, aromatic cheeses have all but disappeared from restaurants. In another effort to "protect" us, the Government is planning to tax sweets and snacks (sin taxes). Green-top, straight-from-the-cow milk is next for the chop.

Is our increasingly Taliban-like Government trying to squeeze every last ounce of pleasure from our existence? Even the estimable Lord Haskins, chairman of Northern Foods and former Labour supremo charged with reducing red tape, has thrown up his hands in despair and admitted that this Government is simply adding to the burden of bureaucracy.

What with the Working Time Directive, disability and employment discrimination acts, the Climate Change Levy, ridiculously complex licensing laws, parental leave rules, employment regulations, genetically modified food labelling on menus, passive smoking legislation, and a raft of so-called food safety laws, to name a few, our businesses are being drowned in quicksand.

Last year, the number of small businesses fell for the first time in over five years. We have become unpaid administrators of the UK and European Governments. Starting a business or staying in business is harder than ever before.

Bad though it is now, however, we will soon be looking back nostalgically to a time when our own elected Government was regulating us. Why? Because the EU plans to sweep away all existing national food safety laws and replace them with new EU regulations covering every category of food premise, from greasy spoon caf‚s to mega-industrial food plants. These regulations will be inappropriate, unworkable and prohibitively expensive.

We stand by, helpless, while being governed by the hopeless. If it continues I'll start preaching revolution, spurred on by a sense of sheer frustration. Why will our politicians not listen to us?

Michael Gottlieb is president of the Restaurant Association and proprietor of Café Spice restaurants and Pencom (Service That Sells) UK