The state should let the fresh air in

Nick Thomas
You read it here first (I use the verb in the present tense, though you might read it, or have read it, as the past, in the future. With me? Wonderful language, English). If any of you has influence with the Government, cut out this column and stick it in the nose of whichever Cabinet Minister happens to share your school run. For in a country that evinces infantile acquiescence in needless or harmful regulations, I have come up with one that might actually do some good.
Now that all the Christmas merchandise has appeared in the shops, we can reasonably look ahead to December, when most of us do our shopping for the festival. This is the time when we go out into the cold in our overcoats, spend an hour in a steaming hot department store, acquire a nasty coating of sweat under our winter layers, then get it chilled on our backs on the way to some other temple of Mammon where we get heated up all over again. Then we freeze as we go back to our warm homes. A month later we repeat the treatment for the sales. Curiously enough, February, the shortest month, is also the one in which there are the most manhours lost to illness.
Americans lead the world in obesity, not just because their food is so cheap, but because they retain the tribal memory of pioneers who constantly feared starvation. Here, the atavistic dread is of the inclement climate: so, with the advent of universal central heating, Joe Public thinks himself cold or mean if he can’t drip around his house in shorts when it’s snowing outside, then goes straight from his infernal home into the frost, and wonders why he catches cold. But no matter: the NHS is there to cure him for free. He, and the taxpayer, would be much better off if he turned the heating down, let in some fresh air and wore a comfortable pullover indoors. Worse, though, far worse, is that he expects his own domestic preferences to be reproduced in his place of work, which is why we sweating, laden shoppers are served by cheery staff who spend their day standing still in their shirt-sleeves.
I’ve looked this up. Health and Safety regulations set a minimum working temperature of 16C, (or 13C if the work involves heavy manual labour) but the maximum is “reasonable”, which means it is defined by the man on the Clapham Omnibus, who might well be on his way to work in a department store.
So, although it is against the grain for a conservative to advocate state interference, I propose a statutory maximum for the ambient winter temperature in public places of 17C (a mild spring day).
Government surely dreads an epidemic that will expose the strain on the health service, and any law that makes our enclosed environments less friendly to bacteria is therefore a good thing. It would be especially effective in places where we are constantly sneezing anyway, from all the perfume samples in the air. It would also enable us, in one giant leap, to meet our carbon emission targets; and employers can use the money they save on the gas bill to give their staff warmer uniforms. And, just to add an example particularly close to my heart, the London Underground, in which people are packed up against one another in a way that disappeared in the dormitories of our public schools a century ago, is currently the best breeding ground for winter bugs. Of course the driver’s cab must be heated, but the carriages are essentially an extension of the street, only without the wind and rain. Nobody takes their coat off on the Tube, so there is no case for heating it at all. What a saving that would be, not just for Transport for London, but for the NHS! Boris, take note.
Drugs companies and energy providers will take a bit of a hit, of course, but they’ve been hedging against a downturn for decades, and nobody cares about them anyway, in the current general grump against global capitalism. So my proposal is voter-friendly, green, and good for the well-being of the nation. I see no reason why it shouldn’t be in every party’s manifesto at the next general election.
The fact that I advocate it because I happen to have a snobbish distaste for the overheated homes and emporia favoured by the lower middle class is neither here nor there. Finding a worthy pretext for promoting a personal bigotry worked well enough for those who disliked smoking in pubs and fox hunting, so I am merely catching the mood of the times. Lobby your MP.
Do it now.