{"id":16474,"date":"2026-06-18T09:14:40","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T16:14:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=16474"},"modified":"2026-06-04T09:22:51","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T16:22:51","slug":"destroying-yourself-one-well-meaning-policy-at-a-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=16474","title":{"rendered":"Destroying yourself one well-meaning policy at a time"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">How do you destroy a company &#8211; or a country? Besides war, there is the unintended consequences of good-sounding government policy. The UK is becoming a poster child of how you destroy a workforce by encouraging them to work less as well as creating endless layers of unproductive government oversight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Reopening a 3.3 mile train line to Portishead from Bristol took 79,187 pages of planning documents. Printed out, that&#8217;s 14.6 miles of paperwork &#8211; 4.5 times the length of the actual railway. The process has taken 16 years so far. (Construction should start soon.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/T3neJOdknqc?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How do you destroy a company &#8211; or a country? Besides war, there is the unintended consequences of good-sounding government policy. The UK is becoming a poster child of how you destroy a workforce by encouraging them to work less as well as creating endless layers of unproductive government oversight. Reopening a 3.3 mile train line to Portishead from Bristol took 79,187 pages of planning documents. Printed out, that&#8217;s 14.6 miles of paperwork &#8211; 4.5 times the length of the&#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"><a class=\"btn btn-default\" href=\"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=16474\"> Read More<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">  Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cool"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4WECr-4hI","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16474"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16475,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16474\/revisions\/16475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}