I do make life hard for the Post sometimes. Last week they had to re-edit my piece for reasons of language and content, in previous weeks they've had to edit for legal reasons or, in some cases¹ cut altogether. And I always send it in at the last minute. SO this week I'm going to try my very, very best to be nice and relaxing and non-threatening. This week: health and safety.

Now there are plenty of jobs where safety is a real issue. The fire service, for example, or the army, or editing my copy. Clearly these people need proper guidance on how to conduct their tasks in the safest possible fashion. For most of us, though, health is the real issue. For people who work all day at computers there is plenty of legislation and while this sounds picky it really does matter. Spend a day sitting at your desk with the keyboard too low and the screen to high and the desk not supporting your back properly and you'll find muscle tiredness, eyestrain, headaches. All relatively minor maladies, perhaps, but work in that sort of environment for a week or a month or a year and it can really play the sort of havoc with your body that could easily be avoided with a better chair.

So essentially health and safety, the business of trying to make us healthy and safe, shouldn't really suffer any popularity problems. It's a system that wants to work for everyone, so why we end up with the rules nobody seems to want and people tutting 'yeah, it's all this health and safety innit²' is very hard to understand. It should be the sort of think politicians are falling over themselves to support, not belittle. Alas, this is not so. And it's all because of conkers.

Well, alright, it's not all because of conkers, but I think it's important to end paragraphs on a cliffhanger where possible. Anyway, conkers do represent the nub of the problem. You may be aware that in the UK it is completely illegal to play conkers³ because it is too dangerous. You may not be aware that this fact is widely believed and entirely fictional. Some schools discourage it, or even ban it, because there is potential for kids to get hurt, but no official body has ordered this activity.

So why do schools panic? They fear the lawsuit, that is why. A child gets hurt, a parent, having been spoon fed a diet of personal injury lawsuits via every broadcast medium possible for about the last decade, gets the idea that; a) they deserve justice or; b) they can get money out of this, and the school gets sued for negligence. And that's where it all goes wrong. The fear of being sued for not protecting those in your charge sufficiently leads to a stifling scenario wherein anything remotely dangerous is banned, the world is plastered with signs telling you not to stand on the twigs in case on of them flips up, stabs you in the chest, punctures your lung and your bereaved relatives sue the park authorities for negligence and emotional trauma, and nobody actually wins at all.

If you think about it, there are losers left, right and centre in this scenario. The lawyers, oddly enough, lose. They lose precious credibility and they also lose (and steal) the genuine value of a no-win-no-fee system that makes legal reparation within the reach of the less well off, which is so valuable if only people can be trusted to use it sensibly. We are stripped of our right to take any risk at all lest somebody gets sued for it and the people who fear getting sued end up looking like they want to suck the fun out of life, when all they want is to keep writs out of their in-tray. Worst of all, perhaps, our sense of personal responsibility is taken away. We are encouraged to believe that we can, or at least should, try to palm the blame for anything bad that happens to us off on to somebody else, and avoid accepting that we are ultimately responsible for us, and that you can't sue somebody else for failing to make allowances for your stupidity.

Well that would have been a nice closer, but I did have just one more little point. All of these definite points undermine the truth that life is a grey area. Sometimes people should be sued, and sometimes not. Sometimes you've been wronged, and sometimes you're just an idiot. There do need to be laws obliging people to make your environments safe and healthy, but it's your body, so you need to take care of it.

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benjaminpmoore

18.03.13 Front Page

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