Real health-and-safety laws exist to protect Britain’s workers, and not to be used as a smokescreen by jobsworths who have little knowledge of the law.
Having had some involvement – as a front line manager and subsequently as a trainer and assessor – I am well aware that the laws were never designed to stop people chasing cheeses down a Gloucestershire hill,wearing glasses on a bouncy castle or any of the other absurd bans that are applied in the name of health and safety.
Good health and safety management is a simple affair – look at what the operation is doing, work out what risks it presents and who is at risk, then manage therm accordingly. It is not about poncing about in a HiVi coat stopping people enjoying themselves and never was. And may all the parasitic “no win no fee” lawyers who have fed off this with their compensation culture rot in hell.
Indeed, the issue is not health and safety law its self. But that compliance with the letter of the law is not enough to stop you being sued (sucessfully) in a small claims court.
It is the fear of litigation that drives all the overreaction and knee-jerk banning.
“…It is the fear of litigation that drives all the overreaction and knee-jerk banning…”
It’s frequently more complex than that: I agree that m’learned friends are mostly to blame, and our host’s fervent wish that they rot in Hell is rather mild – I would add a considerable period of agonised suffering prior to said decomposing.
One also has to bear in mind the type of person who runs around in a HiVis vest banning/prohibiting anything he or she can: usually they are social inadequates, generally otherwise unemployable, and so angry with the rest of the world for being normal when they themselves are doomed to eternal twatishness, that this is their willy-waving/Napoleon syndrome or whatever other fancy psychobabble name you care to assign to it.
Basically, this job – like many others giving some degree of minor authority – attracts just the sort who should be disqualified from applying.
It is not about poncing about in a HiVi coat stopping people enjoying themselves…
But that’s the rub. ‘Poncing about in a HiVi coat stopping people enjoying themselves’ is exactly what it’s about. That’s what floats their boat. It’s why they do it.
And as you say, TT:
“Basically, this job – like many others giving some degree of minor authority – attracts just the sort who should be disqualified from applying.”
Which is what I’ve been saying about politicians for donkey’s years. Anyone who wants to be PM should automatically be disbarred from ever getting even a sniff of the job.
I have a crackpot theory about HiVis jackets. It’s to do with socialism but not in the political sense. If you look at social insects you see a queen, caste systems, farming of livestock and crops, slavery etc. People
say that ants and bees are advanced but my hypothesis is that social interaction leads to an insect-based society. Mole rats exhibit the beginnings of the symptoms and humans are worse. A group of HiVis workers look like wasps on two legs.
This also explains the emergence of the parasitic sub-species known as psychopaths, analogous to the various types of insects which help themselves to the riches of the hives and nests. With insects they hide via pheromones; with us it’s via rhetoric. But they aren’t normal and they don’t care, they feed upon us and – as with insect societies – they make us complicit in the deception.
Hmmm
Last week, at Tipton Station (West Midlands) I saw a man on the platform wearing a HiVis jacket.
However, he was also wearing camouflage trousers.
He must have been very indecisive, or confused…
Funny you should mention Tipton, the incumbant Mayor is being accused of sexual misconduct.
http://flaxensaxon.blogspot.com
The accusatory finger on elf and safety might also fairly be pointed at the insurance companies who are as often as not behind some of the nonsenses like wearing glasses on bouncy castles and the cheese rolling. The nonsense increases doubly when the insurers and my learned friends get together.
Insurance companies are faced with a dilemma – cough up ten grand now to settle the claim and make it go away, or take the risk of forking out forty-five or fifty grand if the case goes against them in court. Unless they have some pretty robust evidence to defend their client, they will settle. Given this, their risk averse nature makes sense. So, it’s the lawyers that need to be dealt with. Do that and the insurers are more likely to relax a bit.
‘Twas ever thus: it’s an age old problem –
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Dick the Butcher –
Henry VI, Shakespeare