‘The War on Terror’. It is not a phrase you hear much any more. The reason for its decline in usage is simple enough. We lost. If we had won, we would have never have heard the end of it.

The War on Terror was never going to be won or lost the same as other wars. Tell-tale signs of who wins or loses a war usually come at the end. It comes in the form of who surrenders, where the new borders are, how many bodies are buried, whose anthem you are made to listen to and whose flag you find yourself saluting. Not so with the War on Terror. The War on Terror was not a fight over land. The War on Terror was a fight over freedom. Apparently we had it, and the terrorists did not like it. They were going to take it away, by killing a few of us and scaring the remainder. That means that a victory in this war is measured in increased freedom. And that is why I am sure we must have lost.

The truly scary thing about terrorism is the idea that you live your meaningless, hum-drum and generally unexciting life and suddenly – boom! – you are dead. You get on a bus or plane or train, walk down the wrong street or into the wrong building and there you come to an abrupt end. One minute you are considering what to eat for dinner. The next minute you are never going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature or become an international playboy or win the lottery or a million other things you were never going to do anyway. Whilst alive, you have hope. When dead, your story is over. The terrorists will randomly, meaninglessly, cut your life short. Of course, people lose their lives every day because of a million-and-one random, meaningless acts. Your car crashes because the accelerator got stuck. You fall off your skis and hit your head. You do not visit the doctor and ask her to check that new lump. You live in Haiti and there is an earthquake. You live in the Congo and a mosquito bites you. So why no War on Skiing? Why no War on Malaria? Why no War on Earthquakes or Cancer or Toyota? It is because we do what we want to do and we want to drive cars and to ski and to spend our time watching television instead of seeing the doctor or designing a better accelerator pedal. And it is because we live in a world with earthquakes and diseases and danger and we accept that. The difference with terror is that, unlike skiers or Toyota or mosquitoes, terrorists mean to kill other people, and if their tactics seem to work, they may do it more.

The problem with dealing with terrorists is they do not know what they want. Or rather, they know what they want, but have no idea how to get it. Terrorists want things like a planet where everyone thinks like them, or glory in the afterlife. Their ultimate goals are fantastic. They are unattainable and disconnected from what the terrorists actually do. The terrorists chances of success are as good as the chances of doctors finding a cure for cancer with bombs or the chances that Toyota will build better cars using bombs. In this world, it is perfectly possible for somebody to want something and have no idea how to get it. That somebody may then do something irrelevant and nasty in the false belief it will help them achieve their goal. We have seen this conundrum with the human race many times before. Worried about the next harvest? Sacrifice someone. Suffering bad luck? Burn the local witch. The terrorists are just the modern incarnation of the innate human propensity to foolishly attempt to solve problems through a futile murder. The War on Terror was a war on a method, not on a country. The method is flawed, because violence does not beget a better harvest or a brotherhood of man. But then, the method to fight terrorism is just as flawed. Killing the terrorists is pointless if new people are born who replenish the ranks of the terrorists. The education that murder is a potential route to success lasts longer than the fear of retributive violence.

We could allow terrorists to believe what they want to believe and then kill them if they act on their beliefs. A better approach might be to change their beliefs. In Afghanistan, the US scored a great victory over the ailing Soviet Union by giving weapons to people who, by most definitions, deserve to be called terrorists. I call that a kind of education – the education that terrorism can lead to success. When the Soviets were defeated, the American money stopped. A better US investment would have been to put dollars into schools. Education would have been a better long-term investment than waiting until the time to fight another war. The West started losing the War on Terror even before it realized the War had begun. We started losing by placing our trust in the wrong methods to achieve our goals. In that respect, we were just as misguided as the terrorists. We were wrong to believe that the threat of greater violence can stop people being violent. We were wrong to believe that spending on being violent to our enemies and spending on security at home is more cost-effective than educating people to stop being violent. Our beliefs were as wrong as those of the terrorist.

It is a poor doctor that treats symptoms and not the cause. We lost the war because we became preoccupied with symptoms and ignored the ailment. Terrorism is a cancer, but killing the cancer with violence only prompts more cancer. Better to live a healthy life and reduce the chances of getting sick in the first place. The discipline of freedom is that we must use it well in order to preserve it. We had the freedom to educate; we did not use it well. Now, we fight violence with violence and sacrifice the one thing we were fighting for: our freedom. We spend on spying on ourselves. We spend on listening to our own conversations. We spend on searching ourselves as we board flights. We spend and spend and spend, and mostly we spend to make ourselves less free, because we do not trust what the terrorist will do with his freedom. We could have spent on educating our potential enemies. We could have given our potential enemy something valuable that would have been diminished each time they kill: the loss of friendships, trade, knowledge, and of their own freedom. If these things have no value to the terrorist, we should spend more on making them valuable to all. Better that than spending on making them less valuable to us.

In her last Christmas message of the decade, the Queen Elizabeth II began by saying:

Each year that passes seems to have its own character. Some leave us with a feeling of satisfaction, others are best forgotten. 2009 was a difficult year for many, in particular those facing the continuing effects of the economic downturn.

The Queen should know. She has given the summary of every year since 1952, with just the one exception. If anybody is in position to objectively scrutinize the vicissitudes of time, it is the immutable Elizabeth II. Her reign is in its fifty-eigth year, she lived through World War Two, and she is the head of a church. Her broadcasts began on radio; now they are on YouTube. In her time Elizabeth has been the Queen of thirty-two separate nations. In 1952 she was the queen of seven independent countries and is currently the monarch of sixteen states. The numbers went up and then down as the British Empire died and spawned newly-independent countries, whilst half of those countries later walked the road to republicanism. Across all those nations, she has had a hundred and fifty Prime Ministers. On a personal level, she bore three sons and a daughter over the space of sixteen years. Elizabeth has seen all four children marry, three divorce and two remarry. Each of her four children has blessed her with two grandchildren. If anyone is qualified to talk about the travail of time, it is the Queen. If she says that some years are best forgotten, then she should know. And if some years are best forgotten, is it not fair to extend that idea to a period of several sequential years, and suggest there might be some decades that are best forgotten?

It is not in keeping with the zeitgeist to find fault with now. We may face problems, and there may be dissatisfactions, but the fault is never with the present moment. Problems may be rooted in the past, or in a lack of progress, or there may be troubles ahead, or there may be a minority to blame for our ills, but overriding every difficulty there is a cosy consensus that we, the great majority, are good. We are fine, and there has never been a better time than now. But if all is well with us, then how do we explain a year to forget. And what was 2009 apart from the natural conclusion to a decade of disappointment. From 9-11, through the tangential response of the second Iraq War, the Indian Ocean Tsunami, political scandals and the failure of the climate change conference in Copenhagen, the noughties were a decade to forget.

What went wrong with the start of the 21st Century? One source of discomfort comes from our own aspirations. Aspiration is easy. It is realization that is hard. The higher the bar, the likelier we are to fall short. In the 1940’s the prevailing aspiration was to defeat totalitarian dictators – except in Russia. The 1960’s were a period of liberation – the start of a process to overcome barriers that society erected for itself. In the 1980’s and 1990’s the barriers were coming down literally, first with the fall of the Berlin Wall and then with the fall of the Soviet Union. Mandela was released from prison. Miscarriages of justice were overturned, like those suffered by the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six. Communism was dying in most countries, whilst a concern for the Green agenda was on the rise. In 1985, Live Aid raised money to ease the famine in Ethiopia. The world was getting freer, richer and safer, and the inevitable exceptions helped to prove the rule.

Whence come the highest mountains? I once asked. Then I learned that they came out of the sea. The evidence is written in their rocks and in the walls of their peaks. It is out of the deepest depth that the highest must come to its height.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Did we reach the highest heights in the noughties, the decade whose very name told a story of indecision and derision? Comfort breeds self-satisfaction. Self-satisfaction breeds complacency. Complacency is a downhill slide. If mountains rise from the sea, it follows that they return to the sea also. Across the world, wanton, selfish and aimless destruction has come to dominate our thoughts. One source of destruction is the nebulous forces of ‘international terrorism’, as much the creation of the war on terror as it is its justification. At the other end of the spectrum from the isolated lunatics who want to end their meaningless lives with a big bang are the overwhelming majority of worker ants, slowly nibbling away at our environment, with no clear thought about the consequences. By ants, I mean all of us, who all contribute to climate change whilst mostly pointing fingers at others in preference to looking to ourselves.

The inheritance of the nineties was squandered in the noughties. Mandela’s truth and reconciliation gave way to dithering about Mugabe’s inversion of racism and killing of democracy on South Africa’s doorstep. The Russians retreated from the chaos of a real democracy to the guided democracy where Putin is either on the throne, sitting behind the throne, deciding who sits on the throne, or is in charge of anything to do with the throne, including how (and if) pretenders to the throne are reported in the ‘free’ press. Meanwhile, the world’s greatest autocrats were rewarded for the economic prosperity of their hardworking and under-rewarded people, and not punished for their continued and unrepentant oppression of them. Their reward was the Beijing Olympics, whose impressive construction program and execution served to show that the world would gladly bury freedom and democracy so long as it was laid to rest in a luxurious coffin.

Western democracies lost their way, and their mandate to preach an agenda that is pro-rights and anti-corruption to the rest of the world. There was a glut of politicians who linked power to wealth in a cycle of seediness: Chirac, Berlusconi, Cheney and even Tony Blair, though the latter had the sense to let his wife do the dodgy deals whilst he was in office, and only spent his time in office laying the groundwork for his future fortune. As his Director of Public Prosecutions told us recently, Blair was a sycophant and that sycophancy has paid off with a string of lucrative deals since. Whether Iraq had WMDs that could strike Britain in forty-five minutes was seemingly unimportant, per the leader’s own report. The objective was bigger than questions about whose lives were at risk and whose lives would be put at risk. The stage was the UN and that most corrupted of all ideas, international law. Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition permanently scarred the features of so-called liberal democracies. Away from the public’s gaze, the real action was found in the flow of money between business and state. An oil tanker was renamed ‘Altair Voyager’ because its old name, ‘Condoleezza Rice’ made some connections too obvious. Ms Rice got a promotion after foolish former General Colin Powell wasted his enormous credibility by proving to the UN that Iraq must have been hiding WMDs (and that was just the intelligence he was allowed to show…) Powell outlived his usefulness soon after. During the noughties, the real leaders of the West were afloat, their feet not touching the ground. They were carried away by a stream of money, a stream that promised to carry them to all their personal and public ambitions. Whilst private ambitions may have been realized, the public ones were not. On the contrary, the deregulation of business and banks proved only that money is always available for a pliable politician, no matter what the price paid by the public. The petty greed of Britain’s Members of Parliament only served to show how far the rot had gone.

The cynicism of the politicians needed to keep pace with that of celebrity. Divorced of talent, the greatest source of fame became fame itself. Non-entities competed to outdo each other on ‘reality’ shows, in the hope of securing riches to follow. Damien Hirst proved that the ‘Young British Artist’ scene was a victory for marketing over art-making, as he turned his idealess dross into a printing machine for money. The public voted for ‘ordinary’ people to be their next stars, living vicariously through their success and failing to see any irony in this circle of self-realization where ordinariness begets fame and fame is its own justification. Bono became more like Bore-o with his endless offering of solutions to the world’s ills, all whilst merrily socializing with the very elite who must be most at fault if anything is wrong. Whilst giving out lots of advice without being asked for, Bono was careful to listen to his tax advisers and effectively become a tax exile from his home nation, even though the Irishman was already benefiting from one of the most generous tax regimes for rich music stars like himself. His countryman Bob Geldof showed that fame fuels vanity more often than it feeds the poor, by reimagining the glory of Live Aid as the pointless publicity exercise that was Live 8. Live 8, for those who forget, was going to persuade the G8 nations to “make poverty history”. At date of writing, poverty is not history, though Live 8 proved a great boost to the sales of the musicians who took part – bands like U2, for example.

At the very start of 2000, I was like many in London waiting by the Thames for the fireworks spectacular to herald the arrival of the new year. A ‘river of fire’ was promised. What we got was the synchronized setting off of wimpish sparklers at regular intervals down the length of the river. It was a disappointment, only to be followed by a long walk home. In hindsight, it set the tone for the decade that was to follow. Indeed, the Chairman of the business that had been paid – by taxpayer’s money – to put on that dismal show went on the media to confirm that it had been, in his opinion, a great success. But then, the Chairman of that business was none other than Bob Geldof. It was fitting that the decade ended in similar disappointment. Even whilst the world’s population is long past the point where they doubt the reality of climate change, the world’s leaders are unable to do anything substantial about it. They all flew to Copenhagen, mostly in private jets. So many went, that the country ran out of limousines to drive around all these world leaders, none of whom were willing to carpool, and the Danes had to resort to driving in more gas-guzzling cars from Germany and Sweden. After a lot of hot air was expelled at the event, the conclusion was bugger all. Which says everything about where saving the planet fits into the big scheme of priorities. The world’s leaders live now, and unlike the Queen they do not intend to stay in charge for another fifty or sixty years, if they even live that long. That makes global warming somebody else’s problem – the problem of somebody who will need to take tough decisions long after the current elite has reaped the rewards of our current profligacy. Yet in the end, the leaders worry more about their power and privilege than anything else, and will do nothing to risk losing that. If they do not prioritize climate change, it is because their minions do not prioritize it either. Desmond Tutu summed up the confusion of the event when he said:

They marched in Berlin and the wall fell. We marched in Cape Town and apartheid fell. We marched in Copenhagen and we are going to get a real deal!

I do not know the South African archbishop personally, but I am pretty sure he does not live in Copenhagen. People who lived in Berlin wanted to see their relatives the other side of the wall. They were opposed by the interests of a small number who had put the wall in their way. When Berliners stood together in great enough numbers, they could not be opposed. People who lived in South Africa wanted to vote, and wanted to vote for candidates with the same colour skin as themselves. Their rights were denied to preserve the interest of a small number. When South Africans stood together in great enough numbers, they could not be opposed. Who stands against saving the Earth? A small minority, but that is irrelevant. It is not the minority that stand opposed to the wishes of the majority that matters here. It is the majority that stand opposed to their own objectives that matters here. How can Tutu justify flying across the world to tell people what they know already? He can because he sees global climate change in the same way as apartheid or the Berlin Wall, as products of a system that favours the freedom of a few over the freedom of the many. Climate change is the opposite problem; it is caused by favouring the freedom of the many, where too many can justify their own behaviour to themselves even whilst they kill the planet with a death by a thousand cuts, or more appropriately a death by a thousand (self-)indulgences. It neatly epitomizes the failure and self-satisfaction of the noughties. With no convenient bogeyman to overcome, we leave ourselves powerless to act even when we know we should.

The noughties were about now. The decade represented waste in all its forms. For the sake of now, we wasted physical resources, and people, and time, and opportunities. Why work when you can borrow? Why wait when you can have what you want now? If we care for the future, we have to stop thinking of now, and start thinking of something more. We must unlearn what we were taught in the noughties. In the noughties, aspiration was justification and execution was irrelevant. The pinnacle of its central conceit – that how much we care is more important than what we do – was climbed by the Nobel committee when they awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to Obama. That prize was given to Obama for what he is going to do, not what he has accomplished already. The Nobel committee has shown themselves to be like too many of the rest of us. They are too quick to be enthralled by popularity. But popularity is transitory. Real worth is measured by constancy. We can only change the world now if that moment extends into a lifetime.

Politicians concerned with their own popularity and power cannot be consistently relied upon to make the world a better place, not least because they fear to tell us the truths we might not like to hear. It takes a leader to do what they think is right, at the price of risking unpopularity, and that is why many of the world’s ‘leaders’ do not deserve that description. It also takes a leader to do what is right because it is right, not because the cameras are there to document it. And a leader is somebody who leads for a lifetime, whether in the limelight or away from it. When a leader says a year is best forgotten, they speak of a worldview that cannot be encapsulated in twelve short months. They measure the now with reference to the past and future, can be patient whilst treasuring their time and doing the small but important things. The Queen does so; reportedly she travels on ordinary trains not just to cut costs and preserve the environment, but because it gives her more time to do her work. What a wonderful example for all of us. Without political influence, the Queen has still played her part in leading the way. Her example shows that the route to a better world is not found in this present moment but through the accumulation of moments into a lifetime of steadfast purpose. We can be true to ourselves as individuals, and strive to make the world better, even whilst the role we are asked to play and world around us changes. Her heritage will last in the world around us, even if the recognition is not long remembered and even if we all end up as republicans. As the Queen hinted, 2009 was a year best forgotten. 2009 summed up a decade that came to nought. For everyone who lived through the noughties, the onus is on all of us to find more purpose in the decade to come.

If you ever watch children playing football, the preparation for the game begins with locating a ball and picking the two teams. The kids will put down jumpers for goalposts or otherwise agree what the goals are. Then they kick-off. They run around and play football. What they do not do before the game begins is form a committee to review the rules of the game, nominate who will be the referee and his or her assistants, or sit down and familiarize themselves with the Football Association’s handbook in case of a dispute later on. Yes, youthful footballers will break the rules from time to time, but they somehow manage to handle transgressions as they go along. With kids playing football, the model of using common sense to decide who has cheated and what is fair usually works pretty darned well, in addition to saving a lot of time and bother. If children can enjoy a good kick-around like that, what then has gone wrong with adult life?

In Britain, professionalism seems to be ever more backed by rules, and ever less backed by professionalism. The nadir came when two Police Community Support Officers, demonstrating little interest in human life, nor support for their community, allowed a young boy to drown because they lacked the training to wade into the water and pull him out. You can only hope and prey that your own life never comes to depend on people who might need to show initiative in the absence of both pay and education, if this is how the professionals behave. The PCSOs had already had a good example set for them. The boy who drowned did so after climbing in to rescue his own sister, yet two adults shirked any sense of moral duty, safe in the knowledge they had no legal duty to get their feet wet. Whilst a child had learnt right from wrong, the cut-price coppers had learned the rules, and the rules said they could not risk their own lives to save another person’s life. The consequence is that they did their job, by doing nothing, and a life was lost. Sadly, this was not an instance where the exception proved the rule.

The worst rules are Health & Safety rules, of course. These rules are in turn fuelled by a litigious blame culture. In a society where every individual is expected to know the endless government rules for what benefits they can claim, what tax credits they are entitled to, and what tax they must voluntarily and cheerily give up for the greater good, it makes sense to create a grey economy based solely on the concept that if something goes wrong, then somebody should be made to pay, and hence somebody must be held to blame. Of course, there are plenty of circumstances where nobody is to blame when terrible things happen. That, however, is uninteresting, so we increasingly employ people so they can be later blamed. If you own a company and allow it to be run by greedy corrupt imbeciles, blame the company’s auditors, not yourself. If you die from heart disease, blame the people who sold you fast food; do not blame yourself for not buying jogging shoes and running off the lard that clogged both your wide ass and narrowed arteries. And if the rain pours and the wind blows, causing your riverside home to flood or the tiles to fall from your roof, blame the builder, blame the engineers who built the flood defences, blame the weatherman, blame anyone – but never blame yourself by buying a rubbish old house in a perilous location. More than anything, Britain has a service economy, and with moving money at a low ebb, the top dog in services is the service in legal advice. We need an economy that keeps lawyers in business. Otherwise, the aspirations of the middle class will be shown to be uncomfortably ill-founded. The foundations are weak because Britain’s service industry is built on a quicksand of its diminished real industry. Lawyers need to be given the right conditions to thrive and multiply, and rules are to lawyers what sh*t is to mushrooms. The greater the number of rules, the greater the need and advantage in engaging lawyers, so obviously we are all better off if there are more rules. All of which means there should be no surprises that lawyers are so keen to be in government, and governments are so keen on adding to society’s inventory of rules.

There is a clue in the world ‘ruler’. Rulers make rules, and they claim to have the measure fo all things. The news is always full of stories of government passing new laws in order to crack down on this and that. But do you remember the occasion when government reduced the number rules, making the rulebook of life lighter, for a change? Despite my ranting, I can think of an example. Small companies no longer need a company secretary that is separate to its single director. That is a good rule change “” the company secretary was a cost but not a benefit to anybody but the people who made money from being company secretary. The upshot is that a company can perfectly well exist with only one employee. But even when the rules are changed by government, some institutions reinstate those rules for the back door. Take Britain’s Royal Mail, for example, well-known monopoly supplier of postal services and net drain on the economy because they always make a loss. They charge about £80 to forward business mail for a year. Yet Royal Mail expect businesses to provide signatures from two employees if redirecting a company’s mail. This is despite the fact the service is identical to forwarding a person’s mail, including a sole trader’s mail, yet you do not need two people to say that one person’s mail should be forwarded. If a company with just one employee wants their mail forwarded, they need to get somebody else to write a letter saying everything is okay. The reason given by the Royal Mail for this rule? They want to prevent fraud. Presumably no fraudster has the imagination or resources to provide a Mickey Mouse letter in order to hijack a business’ mail. Or, rather, Royal Mail can contemptuously say they have done everything they could to prevent such fraud. Of course, it is easier for many modern business to just shift all correspondence with banks and suppliers on-line, and avoid relying on the Royal Mail altogether. Hmmm… now what were those Royal Mail strikers saying about the vital service they provided and how they deserve to be subsidized as a result?

The ultimate in rule-driven paradoxes is when Government, the highest rule-imposing body in the land, sets rules for itself. It is the metaphorical equivalent of somebody who counts the calories whilst shoving another cream pie into their face. However ridiculous it is to set rules for yourself, that is what the British government is preoccupied with doing. For example, they intend to introduce a rule which will bind them to pay off the huge national debt they have run up. What is the point of this rule? It is to say they trust themselves to manage the economy, but they do not trust themselves to manage the economy, so they will manage the economy by imposing a rule that they will follow no matter how much they do not want to follow it. This is from the same people who promised an end to boom and bust. Either government needs to borrow or it does not. If they need to borrow, they should, and if not, they should not. Setting a rule blindly of the circumstances is meaningless. The same government already had a rule about borrowing over the economic cycle. First they stretched it, then they broke it, and they justified this by saying they needed to. Fair enough, but that means the rule itself is pointless. Now the government offers a new rule, which is a rule to pay off the debt. It may be a rule, but is not a consistent yardstick for how they will behave.

The irony is that this is a government well versed in bending and breaking rules, such as the rules on when you can start a war. The Iraq Enquiry plods along. The inevitable revelations focus on how government lawyers thought the government was breaking international law by instigating an attack on Iraq without a UN resolution. The absurdity of rules is exemplified by they interplay. For example, wars cost money. They cost lots of money (as well as lives). That is why troops get killed for want of helicopters and body armour, because troops are cheap but helicopters and body armour are expensive. And now we have a rule on paying down the national debt. Does this mean that, if the situation were the same and there was another Saddam Hussein pretending to have WMDs, we would not go to war? International law on starting wars would not be the impediment, but heavens forbid we break our own rules on managing public sector borrowing and find ourselves unable to pay the price of more military intervention.

There are rules everywhere you look these days. Keep off the grass. Maximum speed 20 miles per hour. No parking between the hours of 8am and 8pm. Inform the dentist of the need to cancel an appointment 48 hours in advance. Tick the box to agree to the personal user licence for this software. Read this summary of the changes in the terms and conditions for your credit card. On top of the rules, there are yet more rules. If you do not read the reams of paperwork explaining the rules for your bank account, then what of it? You can rely on the reams of rules created by Government and the reams of rules created by the banking regulator to ensure the bank’s rules are reasonable after all. If the government’s rules are no good, then go to Europe’s rules. And if America’s rules get broken, they can also be applied to British citizens, ensuring international rule subservience. Subservience, that is, for common people. Politicians tend to be exempt from the rules, reportedly for the good of everyone they represent.

Remarkably, for all the rules in force in Britain, there is never a rule when you need one. In Doha I queued five hours for tickets to a football game, and not a single person pushed in. If only visitors to the Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Royal Academy were as well behaved as those footy fanatics. On a rainy day, the security guard repeatedly asked people to budge forward in the long and winding queue, for the sake of ensuring everyone was under shelter and the building entrance was not blocked. Without complaint, they did so. Yet despite the visible evidence of a long line of people waiting patiently, two old dears bypassed the long line, strolled straight up to the counter and proceeded to reach into their purses to buy two tickets. So much for rules in nation that supposedly loves to queue. I was thankful that the woman behind the counter was made of sterner stuff than the timorous security guard who had been so confident in instructing people to take two steps forward whenever a gap emerged in the queue. The ticket vendeuse, spying my flabbergasted look at these two rude and selfish old women, challenged their presumption and sent them to the back. From appearances, the ill-mannered duo looked like retired teachers, which might explain the need for endless ASBOs for Britain’s youth.

You cannot entirely blame British government for the purgatory of rules taken to inhuman extremes. In the final reckoning, politicians tend to obey their voters and generally follow the fashions of the era. As far as the average Brit is concerned, football is far more important than politics, and football is far from immune to the chronic disease of the creeping rules. Even little children can throw down their jumpers for goalposts and enjoy a perfectly fun kickabout, but for multimillionaire professional footballers, rules are a constant source of frustration, thanks to their application, non-application or misapplication, depending on which side you play for. It is not hard for kids to referee their own games, because football has so few rules. Do not use your hands. Get the ball in the net. Do not try to defeat an opponent by swinging a machete threateningly in his direction. But listen to the endless drivel of overpaid pundits and cry-baby managers, and you would think that football is the unfairest game in the world, in desperate need of a rules overhaul. TV replays, extra assistants, fitter referees, and even the manager’s right to challenge decisions have all been proposed as solutions to the seeming plague of ‘bad’ decisions. Meanwhile, the rules themselves are tweaked for the good of the game. Level is onside, keepers can move sideways at a penalty, kicking the ball away merits yellow and a foul by the last man deserves red… did these rules really improve the game so much?

The eccentricity of sporting rules is that they apply to the other side, not your own. You still hear people still repeating the delusion that British players cheat less than their European counterparts. Presumably anyone who still believes this must always shut their eyes whenever players with extraordinary strength and balance, people like Heskey, Owen, and Gerrard, make a purposeful run in the penalty box. You are more likely to see Gerrard launch into a stream of upper cuts in a bar than see him trip up whilst walking down the street. But put him in that mysterious zone that surrounds the opponents’ goal, a rectangular version of the Bermuda triangle, and strange forces compel him to collapse to ground faster than a tower of cards built atop a jenga tower on a rickety stool. With the stool on the top flight of Blackpool Tower on the windiest day of the year. In the most debated example of rules confusion in recent weeks, the Irish team expected all rules to be rewritten because one decision went against them. To hear the protestations on behalf of the Irish national team, after being unfortunately defeated in the their World Cup qualification play-off with France, you would think they were odds-on favourites to win the tournament, instead of a hapless marginal team that failed to well enough to go through based on the results from their qualifying league alone. But it is difficult to be too harsh on the Irish, as half of their squad is British after all, reliant on mysterious grandparents and great uncles to be eligible to play for a land which they only tend to visit when playing ‘home’ games for Ireland. And tells you all you need to know about the purpose of rules in international football.

Not everywhere in the world is hamstrung by rules. Being abroad, it is a revelation to discover there are places where you can swim in the sea without disclaimers warning that you might be drowned, and fizzy drinks cans that assume you can pull a ring without severing your forefinger. At the aforementioned queue for football tickets in Doha, they kept the store open an extra hour beyond closing time, because serving customers is considered a higher priority than subservience to the employment contracts of the people paid to sell those tickets. Britain has the mother of Parliaments, and she is the happy matriarch of every Brit. Mother’s been parenting her children for a long time. She does not much enjoy letting them off the leash, never mind trusting them to make their own decisions.

Even when leaving rules Britannia, they give you a parting gift of extended rules impositions to tide you over until you return. A bag that was light enough to be allowed in the cabin on the way in is subjected to a precise weighing to confirm compliance whilst on the way out. See-through bags of toiletries had nestled unmolested in hand baggage prior to arrival, but demand thorough inspection on departure. These transgressions, though, are mere peccadilloes compared to the great bête noire of international travel “” believing you should be free to move around this world without a piece of paper that gives you permission. I do understand why there is a rule that says I am supposed to have a valid passport. What I do not understand is the remarkable effort is put into enforcing this rule, which at every turn presupposes that previous checks had been performed by bumbling nincompoops. The airline checks my passport when I check-in. At the border control, my passport is checked in addition to the boarding card I got when checking in. At the departure gate, they check my passport and tear my boarding card in two. In the hour or so from start to finish, my passport has not changed once, but it has been checked three times. Then, when sitting in the departure lounge, two border agency goons are wandering around. What are they employed to do? You guessed it. They check my passport. Clearly not overworked, they would have checked my passport twice if the dozy woman, following the same path trod by her burly male colleague a mere two minutes before, had not been challenged about the need for a passport to be checked twice. Which tells you everything you need to know about the quality of the check “” what if I had been lying? She did not check that, but just took my word for it.

Rules are imposed by big people on little people, which is why parents set rules for children, and not vice versa. You and I may not be allowed to drive in the bus lane at any time (unless you are driving a bus) but when Tony Blair comes to town, he should stop the traffic, or so the theory goes. All of which explains why certain rules, like those for claiming expenses or paying tax, are so liable to be bent, twisted, exploited, broken and cheated by the ultimate rule-makers, our Members of Parliament.

Rules turn us into children. Not happy children playing in the park and making things up as we go along. Miserable children, bound and gagged and unable to act or think for ourselves. For adults to depend on rules is troubling, because there are no adults who can be relied upon to be more adult than any other adult. Which means we might as well recite rules in the mirror and enforce them by bending over and spanking ourselves. If kids playing football can get by with few rules, maybe they have more sense than the infantilized grown-ups around them. They get by with a sense of right and wrong, of luck and misfortune, of getting up and getting on with it, no matter what the game, or life, sends their way. Adults, in contrast, substitute lengthier rules for shorter rules and consider this to be a sign of great progress. They are wrong, and with rules, we have long passed the point where less would be more. We need fewer rules and to follow them, not more and to ignore them. The problem is, there is no way to turn the tide and have fewer rules in future “” unless we wrote a new rule that makes that happen…