This week in an article in the Evening Standard David Cameron claimed his government was "waging war against the excessive health and safety culture that has become an albatross around the neck of British businesses." The figurative Albatross he is referring to is from 'The Rime of the ancient Mariner', a bleak poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in which a sailor, having heedlessly shot an innocent albatross, is forced to wear its carcass around his neck by his fellow seamen who believe its killing to be a bad omen.
If the Huffington Post headline "Cameron Vows To Kill Off Health And Safety Culture" didn't sound as ominous (or omenesque) to you as it did to me then its probably due to the extensive catalogue of negative stories splashed across the tabloid press over the last decade concerning health and safety regulation. Typing the phrase "health and safety" into the Daily Mail search engine results in a list of negative stories spanning 388 webpage's. This smear campaign means that anything attached to the words "health and safety" can now be dismissed with little consideration and it seems that our prime minister is all to happy to invoke it's unpopular public image.
"Talk of health and safety can too often sound farcical or marginal. People think of children being given goggles to play conkers, or trainee hairdressers being banned from using scissors. But for British businesses - especially the smaller ones that are so vital to the future of our economy - this is a massively important issue."
You might think me overly cynical for saying so but what the prime minister neglects to mention is that its also a massively important issue for big businesses. The kind or businesses that help fund the conservative party and are forced to spend a lot of money on lawyers and paper work to prove that they are not only regarding buy held to account for the safety of their operations. Cameron continues.
"Every day they battle against a tide of risk assessment forms and face the fear of being sued for massive sums. The financial cost of this culture runs into the billions each year. Harder to calculate is the cost in terms of attitude: the way it saps personal responsibility and drains enterprise."
For some reason, be it a sign of how our government is perceived or how I perceive the government, I can't help but suspect that this 'war' as Cameron calls it will be a war waged against the consumer and the worker. After all it's consumers and workers who, if this war is won, will inevitably have a harder time claiming compensation for injuries or illness and will find themselves in less safe environments for the sake of British business. The Daily Mail may have had hundreds of negative stories regarding Health and safety but it didn't have more then 600,000. That's how many people each year, according to The Access To Justice Action Group (AJAG), use 'no win no fee' to gain justice involving cases that wouldn't be viable for a solicitor to take on. If we're not too careful we could find ourselves supporting a war with the ultimate aim of protecting the rich from the working class, the middle class and from the incapacitated. David Cameron finishes his article on an unnerving note.
"Above all, we need to give British businesses the freedom and discretion they need to grow, create jobs and drive our economy forward."
What worries me here is the use of the phrase 'above all', should the interests and freedom of British Business really be "above all" else? It's an easy phrase to throw into a populist rant against a tabloid bogyman but I help but suspect that Cameron has exposed his leading priory. It might be a priory you agree with but was it not 'the freedom and discretion to grow' that allowed the banks to ruin our economy free from regulation? Surely the 'freedom to grow' can justify anything, be it the abolition of our planning laws, the buying of our politicians or the right to pollute the planet with impunity. Anything that doesn't help business grow could simply be described as an albatross and abolished. AJAG has described the government's plans as "Robin Hood in reverse" and said "It will effectively exclude many people from gaining the compensation they badly need to pay for treatment and put their life back on track." For Cameron the freedom of the CEO to disregard the safety of others might override our freedom to a legal and legislative safeguard. Now in the name of freedom he is tilting the scales of justice in favour of wealthy business leaders.
I am now left with one very long but very important question. If the safety of consumers, the safety of workers and the financial security of the injured is an albatross around the neck of a private sector and the political class will comprise our freedom to serve that private sector, will we the British public ever consider our politicians sycophantic fixation with the success of business to be an albatross around our neck? The dejected protagonist in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's epic poem only found himself cursed by a dead albatross because he killed the bird after it had brought good luck back to a lost ship and saved the crew. The 'health and safety culture' can be expensive, tedious and time-consuming but it doesn't take a social historian to tell you that it's a lot better then what we had when Samuel Taylor Coleridge was alive and all it meant was not shooting seabirds.