Health, safety and stupidity

I'm all in favour of good health. I think safety is something we should all be aware of, but I am dismayed by the increasing level of stupidity that is infecting the powers-that-be in the world.

Good health must surely be a value that everyone strives for. Seeing little children starve in Sri Lanka because the Sinhalese majority has taken against the Tamil minority (racism exists all over the world!) is distressing indeed. There is no reason for malnutrition in the 21st century. Safety is something we should always be championing. It is totally wrong for a construction company, for example, to take short cuts with builders safety. It is wrong for drivers to take a cavalier attitude towards pedestrians. However, trying to judge whether the moon might land on a school full of children represents mind-boggling stupidity.

Captain Mainwaring was keen to judge Private Pike as a "stupid boy". But we have stupid people these days in positions of authority. They stupidly perceive of every possible scenario that danger can present. Stupidly they think we cannot walk in snow, stupidly they think we might fall off stepladders. Tree climbing, jumping, walking fast, all these things are looked at with a suspicious eye. Not because they care much for the person who may fall off a stepladder, but because they fear litigation by greedy people.

That's the nub of health and safety. Precious little to do with health or safety, rather it is fear fighting greed. Lawyers seeking to encourage banana skin dropping so they can pursuade a gullible "trippee" to sue whoever. The prize for monumental stupidity goes to the brain-dead occupants of the Health and Safety Office of the Bodleian Library. These morons deem the stepladders, used to obtain books from high shelves, present a risk to health and safety. Laurence Benson, the library's director of administration and finance, said, "The balcony has a low rail and we have been instructed by the health and safety office that this increases the risk. As part of the process the restriction on the use of ladders on the balcony have been introduced. The library would prefer to keep the books in their original historic location - where they have been safely consulted for 400 years prior to the instructions from the Health and Safety office." There we have it. Used safely for 400 years. Not one undergraduate has fallen off the ladders. So where it was perfectly acceptable in 1609 to go up the ladders, and ever since, in 2009 it isn't.

Now we find another fear-driven bit of nonsense. Schools favour replacing knotted school ties with clip-on ones. Some schools have raised concerns about ties catching fire in science lessons, getting trapped in technology equipment or ties getting caught when pupils were running. They even think pupils might want to strangle one another. All this nonsense is driven by fear. I had a perfectly good school tie I remember. I did science lessons and if the tie got in the way I used to place it over my shoulder or tuck it into my shirt. The good thing in the Sixties was we didn't have such stupidity surrounding us. Now children are growing up with teachers fearful of the slightest trip or fall. It used to be called mollycoddling.

I suggested to one teacher when we had the snow that the school wouldn't be producing any Arctic explorers. My remark was met with a look as if to say "it's the system, not me!". Now where did we hear that last?