Tory Prime Minister David Cameron declares war on « Safety Culture » / Boing Boing

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  • 2012: Tory Prime Minister David Cameron declares war on “Safety Culture” / Boing Boing
    http://boingboing.net/2017/06/17/tort-reform-astroturf.html

    The Conservative Party — and free market ideologues — have waged a long war on “safety culture,” insisting it was a nonsensical, incoherent regulation that acted as a drag on every business except no-win/no-fee lawyers, who exploited these rules to victimise poor corporations with punishing lawsuits.

    The reality is that the alleged health-and-safety-gone-mad overreach was almost always an urban legend, a rule that didn’t exist and never existed (though it might be cited by a puny martinet of a middle-manager as a way to force their underlings to do their bidding). In their brilliant, beautifully written and beautifully researched 2014 book, In the Interests of Safety, Tracey Brown and Michael Hanlon from Sense about Science showed how tabloids, petty bosses and bureaucrats, and credulous members of the public invented the excesses of “Safety Culture” — while actual health and safety pros soberly and cautiously put forward the rules that stopped us all from dying of food poisoning, defective cars, or in terrible blazes in firetrap buildings.

    London fire: just last year, Tory landlord-MPs rejected Labour’s tenant safety law / Boing Boing
    https://boingboing.net/2017/06/14/voting-their-interests.html

    The death-toll on London’s Grenfell Tower fire continues to mount, it’s worth remembering that there are no “natural disasters,” only human disasters, created by people who weigh different interests in the balance and create policies based on the way the scales come up.

    So it was that a year ago, a group of Tory MPs largely composed of commercial landlords voted down Labour’s amendment to the Housing and Planning Bill that would have required landlords to make their properties safe and “fit for human habitation.”