A government official said in a recent radio interview that something or other hadn’t gotten done because, “it was tied up in red tape.” That got me wondering just what red tape actually is and where did it come from? I decided to do a little sleuthing for answers.
My first stop was the local library. Unfortunately, the clerk I asked about it said he would get back to me, but later confessed he couldn’t access the documents that could accurately define it because they were, “bogged down in red tape.”
Next I checked the Internet, and after being shunted back and forth between different websites (more red tape), I managed to unearth a couple theories about red tape’s origins.
Rewind to the 16th century and we find that Henry VIII sent no fewer than 80 petitions to the Vatican requesting an annulment from Catherine of Aragon, the first of his six wives. Each document was bound with red tape. Officially, they remain as they were delivered to this day in the Vatican archives – red tape and all. It is a matter of record that the Pope refused all 80 of the king’s requests. Naturally, the king, tired of the red tape, dissolved the marriage on his own, married Anne Boleyn, and started his own church.
Also in the 1500s, King Charles V of Spain reportedly separated his “to do” list into important matters and routine matters. The important ones he bound with red tape. The chronicles report that many of these spent years going back and forth from desk to desk without being resolved. Apparently, no one wanted to be responsible for making a decision on something that was important enough to be tied up in red tape.
Reportedly, red tape got such a strangle hold on the Spanish government, that to this day the top brass binds important documents with red tape as a signal that they are to be dealt with at the very highest level.
Charles Dickens used the term red tape to decry government inefficiencies, over-regulation and draconian policies. The writer Thomas Carlyle referred to red tape as the binding agent used by bureaucrats to keep things from getting done.
Governments have long tried to reduce red tape. The European Commission, the administrative arm of the European Union, once offered a reward for suggestions that would cut through red tape. The matter was discussed at the commission’s 2008 conference.
No action was taken, however, and reportedly, ever since has since been bogged down in red tape.
