Next week the nation will unite to celebrate the fact that an elderly woman isn’t dead yet.

The Queen will reach her Diamond Jubilee, and as punishment she’ll have to suffer thousands of idiot well-wishers, the BBC disappearing up her backside and a concert featuring Ed Sheeran and JLS. (Incidentally, doesn’t all the expense lavished on Gary Barlow and fireworks stick in your throat? Even staunch republicans would’ve been won over if the Queen had simply cancelled all parties and spent the money on a new hospital.)

Tubby funster Eric Pickles is getting into the spirit of things by urging party organisers not to be held back by health and safety.

‘Unnecessary and irrelevant health and safety regulations should not be used as an excuse to prevent people to celebrate,’ says the local government secretary. ‘The only red tape in sight should be the Jubilee bunting hanging in the streets.’

So that’s it, people of Britain, you now have Pickles’ permission to do what you like. Set yourself on fire, jump off a tall building, punch yourself in the face - but only whilst whistling God Save the Queen and pledging allegiance to the Crown. Of course, he’s right. We can’t let the jobsworths spoil our party, with their silly rules and regulations.

But who exactly was trying to? Pickles urges councils to ‘do their bit’ to join in and lift restrictions on health and safety, but I can’t find many who were attempting to smother the fun. My home council, Tower Hamlets, is hardly intent on party pooping - indeed there is no mention of health and safety in its guide to the ‘Jubilee Jamboree’ on its home page.

You’ll struggle to find a single council official, in the words of employment minister Chris Grayling, ‘out to spoil everyone’s fun in the name of so-called health and safety’. Instead it’s Grayling’s own prime minister, David Cameron, who in January warned about the ‘health and safety monster’ threatening the UK, despite knowing full well it was the myth rather than the reality of a compensation culture that created such hysteria in the first place.

Having created the monster, fuelled by a rabid right-wing media, the government now blames local authorities for feeding it. It’s a remarkable example of disingenuous spin.

If Cameron and his comrades would pipe down about health and safety for a moment, perhaps we wouldn’t all be so afraid of it - but of course we know it benefits them to keep the fear alive. Litigation is the bogeyman in the room and only Cameron, Pickles et al can save us from it.

The government is quite right. We should be free to enjoy a Jubilee weekend and toast Her Maj. But don’t forget it was their regurgitation of the health and safety monster that threatened the celebrations, not some convenient, non-existent jobsworths.

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