Read And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson for Free Online Page B

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    ‘Scramjets will never happen,’ one expert said. I told him never was a big word, but he was adamant: ‘Not just not in your lifetime. Never.’
    Nasa has to smile sweetly when people talk about getting to the moon in 30 minutes because they have to whip up the imagination of Hank from Minnesota. They know that, with no bucks, there’s no Buck Rogers.
    The British team members, along with their Australian partners, never made a big deal of their success because they knew it would work only on cruise missiles and tank shells. I’m afraid that we’re still stuck on our Airbuses andjumbos, lumbering through the ozone layer at a miserable 500 mph.
    Don’t despair, though. While the Americans are busy congratulating themselves for their 11-second leap into the record books, the boffins at QinetiQ have moved on to the next stage: a plane that will cruise at Mach 5. It’s called the sustained hypersonic flight experiment, it uses the proven ramjet from a Sea Dart missile and the first model, they say, will be airborne in 18 months’ time.
    Expect to read about it in about five years when the Americans make it work too.
    Sunday 4 April 2004

Health and safety and the death of television
    At the Last Supper Jesus washed his disciples’ feet, and for 2,000 years Christians have followed suit, going to church at Easter so the vicar can move among them with a wet towel.
    This week, however, at the Maundy Thursday celebration in Sheffield Cathedral, the Revd Jack Nicholls had to use a different towel for each member of the congregation in case he passed on a bout of athlete’s foot. Welcome, everybody, to the mad and dangerous world of the Health and Safety Executive.
    This is a world where army training courses in the Brecon Beacons must now be fitted with handrails in case the soldiers fall over and where baby walkers are banned in case the toddler topples into the fire.
    I need to be careful at this point. The Health and Safety wallahs are a touchy bunch, saying they do important work such as stopping nuclear power stations from exploding. Almost certainly they would say, if Jesus came back to Earth tomorrow and washed two people’s feet with the same towel, that they wouldn’t prosecute him.
    Unless one of them had leprosy, of course, in which case they’d have no alternative. And no, Mr Christ, we won’t take into consideration the fact that you have in the past brought people back from the dead. Also, can you stop walking on water, because that’s just stupid.
    I don’t deny that the Health and Safety Executive stops children from going up chimneys, but mostly what it does is infect the nation with a sense that ‘being safe’ is more important than being happy. They even argue that ‘health and safety is the cornerstone of a civilised society’. But this couldn’t be more wrong.
    Health and Safety is the cancer of a civilised society, a huge, ungainly, malignant, pulsating wart.
    In the past, companies used to live in fear of the trade unions, who would walk in through the front door and usher every worker they found out through the back.
    We thought the Arthur Scargills and Jimmy Knapps had been killed off by Margaret Thatcher; but no. They have simply metamorphosed into the Health and Safety Executive, and now they’re back, sticking their trouble-making noses into every single aspect of every single thing we do.
    Only last week it was revealed that in the past three years 15 people have been killed on a single stretch of road in Wiltshire. One road safety campaigner greeted the news by saying, ‘It’s the same as a jumbo jet crashing every year.’
    I’m sorry, matey, but if you do the maths it just isn’t.
    Today, companies can get a government bribe of up to £100,000 if they employ workers’ safety advisers. But don’t be tempted, because these idiots will argue that your office carpets are more perilous than a terrorist bomb.
    No, really. We’re told that 95 per cent of major slips at