Plans to silence the beloved chimes of London’s Big Ben for FOUR YEARS is wrong, wrong, wrong!
NEXT Monday, the chimes of Big Ben will ring out at noon, as they have done almost every day since July 11, 1859.
Then we won’t hear them again for another four years.
Yes, you read that right. Four years. It will be the longest time that Big Ben, technically the nickname of the bell rather than the clock, has fallen silent in its history.
During the First World War, the bongs stopped for two years because they might attract Zeppelins.
They also went quiet during the funerals of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.
From time to time, the intricate clock-and-bell mechanism has broken down. Sometimes the culprits were snowstorms and heatwaves.
Once, a flock of starlings slowed the minute hand by perching on it.
But those were accidents. This stoppage has been carefully planned.
The whole Palace of Westminster is being restored, including its Great Clock of Big Ben, which is being dismantled cog by cog for the first time.
Absolutely no one disputes that the work is necessary. The Houses of Parliament were rebuilt using crumbly stone after a disastrous fire in 1834.
The whole building is in a wretched state of repair — appropriately, some might say, given the shameful quality of today’s parliamentary debates.
The problems extend to Big Ben’s tower, now called the Elizabeth Tower in honour of our present Queen, where metal fatigue has set in and bits of the belfry may have to be replaced.
But four years? What on earth can justify silencing the chimes for so long?
You won’t be surprised by the answer: Health and safety, whose ever-expanding regulations are the holy writ of Britain’s bureaucratic classes.
The chimes could damage the hearing of the workmen, we’re told.
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But won’t they be wearing state-of-the-art hearing protection?
That is beside the point, comes the reply. It would be “unacceptable” to ask them to wear it for so long.
That word “unacceptable” always raises my suspicions.
It’s forever on the lips of public-sector unions — for example, when they are explaining why Tube drivers can’t be expected to give up their grotesquely outmoded working practices.
It’s the mantra of officials who refuse to let common sense disrupt the timetables they have drawn up for lavishly funded projects.
Lavishly funded by you and me, it goes without saying.
The renovation of Big Ben alone is likely to cost £60million, double the original estimate.
Needless to say, they got nowhere. The civil servants in charge of the Palace of Westminster are as deaf as a post when awkward questions are raised.
And it has nothing to do with working so close to the 13-ton bell.
Ever since the Seventies, the functionaries of Whitehall, never the most flexible of folk, have become ever more dogmatic and rule-bound.
The reason isn’t hard to fathom. They’ve fallen in love with the unelected European Commission, which hands down decrees in the haughty manner of a medieval pope.
A compromise that would allow us to hear those evocative chimes at least some of the time before 2021?
“Unacceptable”, they cry, pointing to the swollen volumes of health and safety regulations with which they justify almost any interference in our lives.
Have they not noticed that something has changed? Did they not hear the almighty bong that sounded on June 23 last year, when the people of Britain voted to leave their beloved EU?
That was the day we decided to rediscover the British courage and common sense that kept the chimes of Big Ben going even when a German bomb reduced the chamber of the House of Commons to rubble.
Let me be clear. No one is willing to endanger the hearing of the workmen who will be restoring Big Ben.
No one is in favour of neglecting health and safety. But four years is preposterous.
It means that some elderly Londoners, including those who remember the comforting sound of the bells amid the terrifying blaze of The Blitz in the Second World War, will never hear Big Ben again.
It is a little-known fact that, 114 steps up the Elizabeth Tower, there is a room where badly behaved politicians were incarcerated.
It has not been used since 1880, when an atheist MP, Charles Bradlaugh, refused to swear allegiance to Queen Victoria.
Perfect! Let’s march the Westminster bureaucrats up those steps and lock the door.
Then refuse to let them out until they have devised a plan that doesn’t keep us waiting four years to hear our beloved chimes ring out again across the Thames.