The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (ROSPA) has succeeded in getting legislation passed through Parliament which would prevent anyone from keeping any sort of knife in their homes unless they could conclusively prove that they were using knives for commercial purposes. This divorce of the age old marriage between knife and fork has sparked an uproar from the Domestic People’s Union (DPU).
“How are the people going to cut their food or butter their bread?”, said a spokesman from the DPU.
ROSPA responded that market forces would have a key role in enforcing the new legislation. Manufacturers would have to ensure that no food product needed to be cut, and that there would be a growth market for companies producing specialised implements to spread condiments that would not be legally classed as knives.
This controversial legislation follows a previous campaign by ROSPA to ensure that hot water in domestic premises could not leave the tap at a scalding temperature. Boris Hargreaves, a member of the Civil Liberties Union, told us that once ROSPA had got that one through, they felt (and indubitably now are) pretty much invincible in terms of legislative power.
In fact, Boris told us that the new legislation was not only infringing civil liberties but was also restricting free trade and amounting to human rights abuses.
The Home Secretary David Blunkett has called on Kofi Annan to hold an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the threat that ROSPA is imposing over free society. Even Robin Cook admits that ROSPA could very well be classed as “A repressive regime” or “a threat to national security”.
Meanwhile, the legislation is now in force, and local authorities are setting up amnesty points for the disposal of illegal cutlery. In an interesting development, the British Steelworkers Union has claimed that the resulting glut of high quality scrap steel could undermine commercial steel prices and lead to job losses.