Just another example of inaccurate right-wing hyperbole
September 28th, 2008
Anyone who’s spent a reasonable amount of time in the UK will know of the Daily Mail, a highly popular right-wing newspaper which regularly twists itself into apoplectic fits of rage over homosexuals, immigrants, people on welfare, teenage mothers, and the state of England’s house prices. The beating heart of this publication is arguably columnist Richard Littlejohn, a self-styled man of the people who draws an estimated £800,000 salary and regularly dispatches columns about the terrible state of Britain from his gated compound in Florida. He’s been awarded ‘journalist of the year’ and ‘irritant of the year’; and branded a racist, a sexist, and a homophobe; one critic described his book as ‘a 400-page recruiting pamphlet for the the British Nationalist Party’ while the leader of the BNP himself cited Littlejohn as his favourite journalist. Ever the embodiment of indignant rage, one of Littlejohn’s most famous catchphrases is ‘you couldn’t make it up!’.
Chief amongst his concerns is homosexuality, but Littlejohn also finds time to regularly decry the Health and Saefty Executive, who he rather unambiguously refers to as “nazis”. Apparently health and safety officials are responsible for sapping the enjoyable danger out of every corner of British life, leading us into a sanitised, hermetically sealed plastic future. Last week’s column starts:
Some years ago, after trapeze artists on a tour of Britain with the Moscow State Circus were ordered to wear crash helmets by the elf’n’safety nazis at Haringey Council, this column speculated about what other indignities would soon be imposed upon performers in the Big Top.
He then goes on to write an entire hilarious column describing a circus stripped of fun by heartless health and safety jobsworths. What Richard doesn’t know is, the Health and Safety Executive are tired of being painted as a bunch of soulless killjoys when they’re simply trying to stop people from eating asbestos flakes or stabbing themselves in the eyes with screwdrivers. So much so that they launched a Myth of the Month webpage designed to counteract the numerous myths that circulate about them. Here’s one from June 2007:
Myth: New regulations would require trapeze artists to wear hard hats
The Reality: Despite being widely reported at the time and regularly repeated since, this story is utter nonsense. There never were any such regulations. Hard hats do an excellent job of protecting building workers from falling debris – but they have no place on a trapeze.
As Littlejohn might say: ‘You couldn’t make it up!’. Only in this case, someone did.
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2 Comments
1. Ian | September 29th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Great stuff, Frankz0rzz! Of course, eating asbestos isn’t as bad as inhaling it!
2. Peter | October 1st, 2008 at 12:20 am
My experience is that ‘health&safety’ often is used by local authorities as an excuse for not having to do something.
The general trend seems to be that there’s a lazy officious person who doesn’t want to bother with something and, as an after-thought, will say “and besides, it’s against health and safety innit”
The disgruntled customer then marches off to the local paper with the story that he was stopped from doing something “because of health & safety”, and it then gets picked up by the Daily Mail – at which point the council is embarrassed into making a retraction and say that there were other reasons why they didn’t want to or couldn’t do something.
The crash helmets business – the HSE may be right that there were never any regulations, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Haringey Council had tried to suggest it.
H&S is like alcohol – it works fine in the hands of reasonable people. But is abused terribly by imbeciles.
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