On Health & Safety

A friend of mine once said “if you can’t pull it, you can’t pull it” – may not seem like much, but it’s succinct and entirely intrinsically true; if you’re not capable, you’re not capable. Note that equally true is the inverse; if you are capable, you are capable. Substitute capability with, say, culpability or liability and we come to the realms of accountability via the long and broad road of common sense. It is this road that our government seems to be finding it increasingly hard to navigate and in this particular situation, I put this solidly down to a case of peeking over the Atlantic fence and finding that in that field of infinitely greener, American grass, accountability can be shuffled off down some long, endless avenue of passed bucks and dodged bullets.

Now, I’m not entirely against government intervention. There are situations wherein the hand of Big Brother is a welcome and reassuring presence. Most memorably written into solid law in my lifetime have been seatbelts, the drink driving limit, the smoking ban, all-seater stadiums, firework regulation; items of good, hardy British government that improve safety and save lives. Where these items work on levels of tolerance, acquiescence and compliance is that they are ways of protecting us from the decisions of others. JS Mill himself would hopefully have allowed these to stand even the rigours of the harm principle. Ok, he may have been shaky on the smoking-ban, but had he wanted to label that despotism, it would definitely have to be agreed that the despot had the best interests of the people at heart.

However, following the (insert affable red, white, blue, stars, stripes metaphor) avenue of ambiguous accountability, we are entering an era of laws being pushed onto us to protect us from ourselves, hauled over our sensibilities like the onset of night. We face libertine darkness brought upon us as the Health & Safety Deathstar blots out the sun over the empire.

It is worth again referring to Mill’s view on despotism here. If people cannot be self-governed, let the government reign by all means. But he meant young children and those in “backward states of society” and I think that while we have our problems as a nation, we’re a long way from the pygmies under palm trees that he probably meant us to consider.

There are ways to go about this. Remember when all of a sudden, pen tops and plastic carrier bags had holes in them? I didn’t ask for it, but I hold my hands up; it’s useful. But when the government decides that I can’t manage even the simplest tasks for myself, I face daily patronisation and subsequent frustration.

We all have horror stories of the onset of this era, from being taken on courses where we’re taught how properly to carry hot coffee, to being denied foam guns in the office lest some poor unfortunate lose an eye. I used to coach a group of teenagers at Paddington Rec. In the height of summer we would traipse through the rolling green to the track and under the beating heat, run, run, drink and look forward to the luxury of the hard, cool, plastic seats erected by the fence. Maybe we’d even watch the footballers bounding around thirstily. Then one week we showed up and were relegated to sitting in the dust as the seats had been closed for “health and safety reasons”. Turns out some poor sop had fallen over on the seats and twisted their ankle. Now since when did it mean that because some kid was larking around that everyone thereafter had to munch dust? Why am I being told that I can’t govern myself even enough to decide if I want to take the risk of sitting on the Seats of Doom? At that moment in my life I could have gone bungee jumping, leapt from a plane, signed up as a paramedic or a fireman or an infantryman. I could have climbed a mountain in the fog, run with tigers or swam with sharks. But I could not have sat on those seats.

Have we really gone so far from the road of common sense? Surely, we can go back, after all it is called common sense, because, well, it’s common? Unfortunately we all have the feeling that this is just the beginning; that it can only deteriorate from here. I have seen signs in supermarkets warning me that melons are heavy. Why? Is it because if that sign isn’t there and I sprain a finger lifting a melon, the supermarket is somehow at fault for not warning me? Isn’t this then a self-fulfilling prophesy? Won’t the supermarket who decides that, hey, some things you should just know for yourself, be the odd one out that does take the hammer to fall? And from then, as the communal barriers our larger institutions form against the flood erode, as bans and limits and fines are levied progressively on the consumption of alcohol, chocolate and sugar, we will eventually be left as individuals against the government in the truest sense of the tyrannical model. Mill would turn in his grave. But there’s a probably a Health & Safety issue with that.