Health and safety

There are 1162 quangos in Britain, costing £64 billion a year, says the cosmopolitan MEP Daniel Hannan in the Telegraph, inviting suggestions about which to abolish.

Even more than the oldest of them all, the BBC, I would have thought that the Health and Safety Executive has done more than any other executive agency to make the British economy less competitive, and life in Britain dull and frustrating.

It is an out-of-control monster that represents everything that is contemptible about the nanny state and embodies the ludicrous conceit that the man in Whitehall knows best. And it has been running without check since 1974, without making any serious inroads into the industrial accidents it was set up to reduce.

They have reduced, of course, but only because Britain has de-industrialised so comprehensively - helped along by the enormous costs added to all forms of employment by the HSE.