I'm sick to death of the sodding whip - why couldn't we just leave it alone?

Here's a New Year's Resolution I'd love to be able to make: I will think less, speak less and write less about the sodding whip.

There are jockeys getting carpeted these days who weren't born when I started spouting on this wretched subject and it ought to be embarrassing to keep banging on along the same lines, years after it's become clear that no-one in a position of power is taking the blindest bit of notice.

An argument I like to push is that punishments for whip breaches, however minor, should be extended to trainers and owners, as a means of getting them to stress to their jockeys how important it is to comply with the rules. I fondly imagined it was still a reasonably fresh line (after all, you hardly ever hear it from anyone else) but I stumbled across an article from a dozen years ago in which I made that very point. I suppose, if it's never tried, I'll never be proved wrong.