Whip penalties are clearly not working in biggest races - so do trainers and owners need punishing too?

I'm feeling a bit better about our whip situation than I was at the start of the week. This may surprise you, in view of the many headlines generated by Frankie Dettori accumulating 16 days' worth of bans on Champions Day. 

There was a certain amount of 'Why, oh why, oh why?' in response to this on social media and I go along with it to a certain extent. Here we were again, turning good news into bad because of our clod-hopping rules, punishing an athlete who had been widely hailed for the excellence of his performances, making a terrible fuss when no-one had been offended on the day and the horses concerned had most certainly not been abused.

If those are your views, I'm not here to argue against them. But for those who read the BHA's press release all the way to the bottom, it was possible to take a glass-half-full view of what had occurred. The offending rate among jockeys this month has fallen to just 0.42 per cent. In other words, at the point where the BHA tallied up its statistics, the first 1,889 rides of October had resulted in a mere eight breaches of the rules.