The food scare precipitated by the so-called "mad-cow disease" prompted the British government to order the destruction of two million cattle, at enormous cost to the taxpayer, and to impose crippling regulations on farmers and food distributors, so destroying the motive and the reward of Britain's indigenous beef industry. The knock-on effect has been to undermine the small family farm, which was the backbone of Britain's rural communities. French beef-farmers meanwhile seized on the opportunity to eliminate their most serious competitor, so precipitating a breakdown in cordial relations between Britain and France.
The destruction of rural England, and renewed hostility between Britain and France, are serious prices to pay for attempting to eliminate a risk that probably never existed. Nobody knows the cause of CJD -- alleged to be the human variant of mad-cow disease -- or the likelihood of catching it. On the available statistics, an inveterate eater of T-bone steaks is 120 times more likely to be struck dead by lightening than to die of the disease. Nevertheless, it seems that whenever a risk -- however speculative -- is identified, governments rush in to control and regulate. How far can this outlook be justified? Is it sustainable? What are the consequences for individual freedom, individual responsibility and the self-renewal of civil society?
Those are real questions, and it is good to find that they can be discussed in Brussels, where the response to risk is invariably yet another European Commission directive. At its recent conference on Rights, Risk and Regulation, the Centre for the New Europe showed how to begin the debate. The first step is to not to look for the risks involved in human life, and then devise some bureaucratic machine for preventing them. Rather, the first step is to distinguish the risks that we voluntarily undertake -- hang-gliding, horse-riding or smoking -- from those that afflict us against our will, like the risk of being knocked down by a drunken driver. Only then can we consider the measures needed to protect us. And we shall always have the question put before us by Terence: quis custodiet illos custodes: who will guard the guardians? Who or what is to control the bureaucrats appointed to control us?
In the past, the answer was obvious: if a government imposes regulations that destroy cherished freedoms and economically necessary risks, then it loses first popularity, and then office. Unfortunately things no longer work like that. Regulations increasingly come from bodies of unelected bureaucrats, sheltered by some trans-national institution which has no electorate to control its whims.
Take, for example, the World Health Organization, a body with impeccable credentials, founded not to control or to stifle but to offer help where help is needed. Since the accession of former Norwegian Prime Minister Mrs. Gro Bruntland to the position of director general, the organization has embarked on an increasingly public and shrill campaign against the manufacture and sale of tobacco, identified as a major risk which it is the business of the WHO to control. The organization's literature identifies tobacco as an "epidemic," to which it attributes, on no clear grounds, 400,000 deaths annually, implying that this "epidemic" is a threat comparable to the infectious diseases -- malaria, TB, AIDS, and so forth -- which we would all agree can be controlled only by effective international cooperation, of the kind that the WHO exists to foster.
Tobacco is called an epidemic on the spurious ground that the methods used to measure its effect belong to the science of epidemiology. By a semantic trick, therefore, Mrs. Bruntland and her team have been able to classify as a dangerous disease what is, in fact, a voluntary activity and a source of pleasure, the risk of which entirely falls on the smoker. By the same reasoning we could link deaths from driving, drinking and junk food to "epidemics," and put cars, alcohol and McDonald's on the WHO's agenda. And no doubt there are activists waiting to do just that.
The WHO's main project for the coming year is to press for legislative measures, imposed from on high by bureaucratic bullying on nations many of which depend on tobacco for their livelihood, to restrict the market in cigarettes. This despite the fact that tobacco-smoking has not been identified as the sole cause of any of the diseases associated with it, or that in the U.S. the average age at death of a serious smoker is 72 -- in other words, about the right age for anyone in his right mind. In her public pronouncements Mrs. Bruntland has nothing to say about the positive effects of smoking, about its economic benefits to the tobacco-producing countries and to all economies which depend upon it as the easiest and most acceptable form of taxation. Nor does she pause to consider whether, in a world where malaria and TB -- which kill people by the thousands in their early youth -- are on the increase, and where AIDS still threatens to decimate whole areas of the African continent, tobacco should really be her first priority.
The fact is that tobacco, as a politically incorrect practice, from which big business is making big profits, seems automatically to justify the attempt to regulate and even to abolish its consumption. Tobacco offers the perfect target for an expansion of bureaucratic powers, and the WHO, being staffed by people who were never elected to their positions, is the perfect vehicle for controlling national legislatures, while avoiding accountability to those who must bear the legislative burden. If Mrs. Bruntland succeeds in her attempts to regulate this particular trade from on high, then the way is open to the policing of all other products against which some pressure group has taken a dislike.
This is not to say that tobacco is harmless, or that the trade in it is a good thing. It is to say, rather, that where the risk of a product falls entirely on consumers and is fully explained to them, it cannot be the business of unelected bureaucrats to forbid or control it. If we lose sight of this principle, then we lose sight of the truth on which all free societies depend, namely that freedom and risk are inextricable, and whoever assumes the right to save me from risks, is also assuming the right to limit my freedom. Certainly people can be granted that right: but only by some form of democratic election -- not, in Mrs. Bruntland's way, by storming into office on the back of a political career, and with a self-righteous desire to control us whether we like it or not.
-- From The Wall Street Journal Europe
Roger Scruton is a philosopher and novelist who lives in England.
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